This is neat, but too bad it wouldn't work for the X Prize. If it takes 9 days to get up there, then comes back slowly too, they wouldn't be able to relaunch the same craft in time. That's a shame, as this sound promising and could really use the extra funding from the prize itself and that the prize's notoriety would help it get.
Hopefully this solution will be developed and used commonly when fats times to orbit aren't a must.
If all the other industries teamed up on the oil industry, sure they'd create a lot of pressure. Until their vehicles all run out of fuel and they have to walk to Washington to do their lobbying.
One of the older PC brnads that's no longer around (I think it was Tandy) sold a series of computers with 256k or 512k of memory. The 256k machiens actually had 512k, but a lead or jumper on the board had been cut to make only half available. By opening the case and remaking the connection, you'd void your warranty but save several hundred dollars.
It's been rumored that currently all Asus-built ATI 9800 cards use the 9800XT chip and memory capable of supporting it. The rumor says it's just a firmware flash for any of these cards to be an XT. I'm not sure of this rumor, but it seems plausible.
Don't forget the state hires Chicago residents to work in Springfield. Instead of forcing a relocation, pays $1400 a month for apartments in Springfield on top of salary and flies those people back and forth.
If only TheRod wasn't trying to be TheDonald, the state would be in fine shape.
Or buy my C64 complete with Commodore brand monitor, 1541 floppy drive, data cassette drive, joystick, modem (1200 bps!), and box of software. Nya.:-P
Seriously though, a straight A/V connection is much better than RF adapters.
Best Buy and other places sell big manually-switched multi-input boxes that have RF adapters built in, too. I've seen ones with as many as eight or ten inputs, four outputs, some with SVideo, some with component video, and even one with ethernet (why you wouldn't just buy a hub I don't know, but maybe people only want ethernet live to their xbox or ps/2 when actually using the console).
The whole idea of a patent is that the inventor publishes the invention. There's no reverse engineering of the patented portion of a system necessary.
That's the exchange made in the patent system --in trade for letting others know how you do something neat, you get to be the only one (or charge them to join you) using the neat trick for a certain number of years. Patented items are specifically not trade secrets. It's the law that protects them.
Granted, some people make their patent applications as vague as possible and try every way possible to get them extended. That's not the way the system was intended to work, though.
1) What's wrong with a set of filters for your streams of complicated objects?
2) You don't have to have common data formats. That's what filters are for -- to massage data into the form needed.
3) XML _is_ text.
4) EJB is scalable how? By running on top of an application foundation which trakes up more processor and memory than every other program on the box just to get started?
The Unix tool-based approach may not be perfect, but how "portable" do you really think EJB is? Ever tried running EJB on a microcontroller? Why not?
Research and licensing is a valid business model. If someone has a reasonable patent with reasonable work behind it, it makes sense that they'd protect it from use without a license.
It's the suits from companies that didn't actually do anything that piss me off.
If the license is invalid, then the work is still copyrighted, but without a license for anyone to use it. Therefore, if the GPL were held to be invalid, the right to distribute, make derivative works from, or make money from any software licensed by it would remain with the author, and only the author. IANAL, but this is pretty basic stuff.
I still use an EGA monitor with an EGA adapter on one of my old boxes, and I use it pretty regularly. It's a text-only system, so it doesn't matter much.
I still play games on my Commodore 64 with its Commodore composite monitor, which is basically just an A/V monitor. I don't really use the 64 for anything other than games, though.
Perl is not analogous to Basic. The difference between Java and Perl is more like Ada vs. C++ than assemnly vs. Basic. They are two languages of fairly equal level with different design goals. They are not one intimately connected to the hardware and one a dumbed-down language meant to teach to children and suits.
Both Scheme and Forth are powerful languages in small packages. Forth maps well onto embedded hardware, and runs quite efficiently. Both languages are usually, but not always, implemented with an interpreter. Compilation to machine code is sometimes done with both. Both languages are quite expressive, so an application's source can be kept small.
I'm not against Perl by any means. It's one of my favorite languages, and I use it for projects of many sizes. It's definitely not dead. I'd like to have it on my phone. I'm just not sure how many people will use it.
Yes, it's great policy to make people who buy their own equipment, pay for their own training, pay for their licenses, and must agree to use their own time and own private equipment for public service when necessary go out and pay for new training, new licenses, and new equipment just to keep the privileges they now have.
The GPLed code in question _must_ be available to the user, per the GPL. A particular person may charge you to give it to you, but they must give you the _source_. Therefore, the software is unleashed from any one master. That's a valid definition of "free", and the one in which most Free Software supporters are interested.
Not all OSes are the same, because some manage computers more efficiently, and most do so in differing and incompatible ways outside a small family of related OSes. A Yugo and a Porsche are both cars, but they are not the same. A farm tractor and a bicycle are even less the same.
Using an OS and changing the source are two different things. You don't have to have the source to use an OS. Having the source does, however, make it much easier to improve it or customize it. No, you don't have to be a programmer to want to make a change to your OS. You can hire someone who is a programmer to make the change for you. Again, this is not necessarily an economic freedom (as in free beer), but a freedom to do something (as in free speech).
Stallman (often referred to as RMS), founder of the free software Foundation, never asserted that a thing cannot be property of its creator. He merely stated that when the cost of making a duplicate of that thing is essentially nil (as in someone being allowed to redistribute the source for a program) that in the long run it is better for society if the author doesn't charge for the additional copies. The value of the work should be covered by the impetus to create it in the first place. If you need it, write it. If you are paid to write it, write it. Then the code was paid for, and additional copies, taking no resources to make, could cost nothing. The body of software available to everyone could then be multiplied by the number of such releases. There of course are people who think it's outright wrong to patent or copyright anything. There are also people who believe in Scientology.
You make many assumptions and generalizations which are unfair. One of them is that everyone who supports Linux is a zealot. Frankly, I don't care if you use Linux or not. I do support the efforts of those who choose to use it and develop it. It's a choice. After all, "free" is about choice.
Think 'unbound', not 'gratis'. Go ahead, call RMS a hippy. He doesn't care. You can call me what you will, too. You are free to do that.
is that you don't have to trip through countless menus and windows to get to something a few keystrokes in a terminal window will do faster.
Pretty pictures for those who want it done easily, a terminal for those who want it done now (or more easily by a program). I like graphical interfaces for what they do well. I like command lines for what they do well.
With OS X, as with most other *nix implementations, I can have the best of both worlds.
Right. You may have disproven that one can never prove a negative.
One caveat to those following along: although it may be possible to prove a negative in such a case, but not in all cases.
In the case of, say...
All squares are also rectangles. Figure 1 is not a square. Is Figure 1 a rectangle?
This boils down to:
If p then q. ~p q?
So in cases that enough information exists, it may be possible to prove a negative. It isn't always possible to prove a negative.
Also, the example given assumes that one can prove ~q in order to prove ~p. Which in turn leads us to the original question: Can one prove a negative?
If q is false by definition, as in it stands for water being boiling and that water is actually frozen, then one could say it's false that the water is boiling and thereby say that it's false that the water's temperature is 100 degrees Celsius.
If q stands for something not so clear, then the example doesn't help much:
If Bob robbed the bank, Bob has had possession of a bunch of money. Bob hasn't had possession of a bunch of money -- or has he? Bob didn't rob the bank... or did he?
The issue here is that you are going to have a hard time proving that Bob hasn't had a bunch of money. Maybe it's hidden, and he's not spending it. Maybe it's already all spent, and you can't figure out what he spent it on. Maybe he gave it all away. If it is found that Bob has had a bunch of money, he could have converted it into other currency or could have earned it some other way. So you'd have to have an exhaustive search for the money, prove it was the money from the bank, and prove that Bob had at no time had possession of it to prove that Bob didn't rob the bank. So while logic may work, logistics will more likely be a hinderance than a help.
In general exhaustive methods make many things theoretically possible while doing little for feasibility.
My employer has many locations, most of which are retail shops. The particular niche of the business is not the point. The point here is that each store has point of sale systems. The POS boxen are swapped out every few years as depreciation and replacement part stocks dictate.
The old ones are still fast enough for productive use in a small office or home network, and employees can buy them really cheap. The official policy is that they are guaranteed not to work, and that you're lucky if everything operates. However, I've bought a few and have had no defects in any of them. One runs my home firewall and another is used for software minimum requirements testing for code I help develop. One was for a friend who, due to being a gull-time college student with barely any income, was stuck in the 486 days. The better ones except for needing video card upgrades meet minimum requirements for most of the Windows games currently on the market, although they fall well short of the cutting edge.
It's amazing what you can find if you know where to look. Within the last year, I built two working laptops from three parts machines. They were state government laptops which didn't have the newest I/O ports built in, and got sold at auction as-is. I bought the leftovers form the guy who purchased them at auction. Worked out great for both of us.
If all else fails, look at your local hardware store for something called Plumber's Putty. It looks like two-tone modeling clay or children's play putty. Work the two together with your fingers to form a slow-setting but very strong epoxy-like substance. It can be drilled, cut, sanded, or painted after being pressed into place and allowed to set completely. It even sets under water. I use this stuff on plastic, aluminum, steel, copper, ceramic, even stone. It'll join one type of material to another as long as they both work with the putty and you use the putty as a filler and not just a thin paste. It isn't always a pretty fix, but it usually dries to an offwhite or light gray color and can be covered with just about anything. I'm not sure how well Sharpie or other permanent markers work on it, but I'd be happy to test it sometime in one of my projects.
As in, they like to use ingredients DARPA people are allergic to, or what?
I think if DARPA wants to limit entries, they should do so up front. It wouldn't be unusual for them to not ebven publicise the event and individually contact each organization who might be interested.
When a private company takes bids or opens a contest according to publicly disclosed rules then rewrites the rules without warning, that's a crime. DARPA should follow the rules set by the government for the people, even if it's not held to the same punishment for breaking the rules.
You can be sued, arrested, fined, and even jailed for reusing copyrighted code that has not been translated into machine code.
Stealing someone's expression of an idea displayed on a compouter terminal is no different from stealing someone's expression of an idea displayed on the pages of a book.
You don't need a universally unique ID for the device.
What you need is a universally unique ID for the user. There's only one person with your email address. RADIUS realms uses the '@' to separate username from the realm. Since a realm is often the same as a domain anyway (although not always), this gives rise to an interesting idea.
Dialup ISPs have been doing limited roaming internally or among a limited number of ISPs partnered specifically for a larger roaming area for years. It's generally done with RADIUS using realms.
All a RADIUS server needs to do is to refer a request for a user in a realm it doesn't handle to the proper other RADIUS server, then forward back the response. Normally you must configure a RADIUS server with which other server is authoritative for which realm. There's no reason there couldn't be a TXT record in DNS that lists the authoritative RADIUS server for a realm that's the same as a domain name.
The other part is a bit more tricky -- the RADIUS server that is authoritative for the domain generally requires that the requesting device (an access server or another RADIUS server usually, but it could be a Linux box or whatever else that wants to speak RADIUS) be listed in advance, and that it shares a plaintext secret used for shared-key encryption.
Billing for usage-based access is often done straight from RADIUS login, logout, and traffic records anyway, so this part is easy.
What would need to be done is for public-key encryption to be used between devices (at least from oen RADIUS box to another or as an option -- it may be hard to get the firmware on certain access servers to do this) and for the authoritative RADIUS servers for one domain to be allowed to authenticate against another domain. With these fairly simple updates to the venerable protocol, it could allow universal roaming not just among dialups and among wireless ISPs, but even across those two types of entities. Then you still have the problem of getting deadbeat hotspot owners and ISP owners to pay for their roaming customers...
Note that cell companies don't all roam on everyone else's networks. There are a handful of networks, and there's coverage in most places by any particular carrier or at least one of their roaming partners. Some cell companies don't do roaming -- if you're off their network, you're out of luck.
So what's really needed is for ISPs and hotspot providers to sign mutual roaming contracts in the model adopted by the cell phone providers. Then, no changes to RADIUS would even be required.
It's often the fact that when you go to reinvent a wheel, it's simply because you didn't bother to see if that wheel existed already. This wheel's been in use a long time. Don't reinvent it.
It certainly wouldn't be a BSD license, which would allow their competitors to clsoe source it again.
It'd be either GPL (doubtful) or something like the Mozilla license under Netscape if it were to happen.
Picture something that allows other people to use and update the code, giving MS the control of the code submitted to them and that requires them to allow further copying of the contributed code but also lets them include it in their proprietary closed-source project along with code that's never been seen outside MS. That's about as Open Source as anyone could hope for from a company that is so scared of the idea.
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This is neat, but too bad it wouldn't work for the X Prize. If it takes 9 days to get up there, then comes back slowly too, they wouldn't be able to relaunch the same craft in time. That's a shame, as this sound promising and could really use the extra funding from the prize itself and that the prize's notoriety would help it get.
Hopefully this solution will be developed and used commonly when fats times to orbit aren't a must.
Why would you use a kernel-based driver for a cheap and flaky sound card in a clustered environment?
If all the other industries teamed up on the oil industry, sure they'd create a lot of pressure. Until their vehicles all run out of fuel and they have to walk to Washington to do their lobbying.
One of the older PC brnads that's no longer around (I think it was Tandy) sold a series of computers with 256k or 512k of memory. The 256k machiens actually had 512k, but a lead or jumper on the board had been cut to make only half available. By opening the case and remaking the connection, you'd void your warranty but save several hundred dollars.
It's been rumored that currently all Asus-built ATI 9800 cards use the 9800XT chip and memory capable of supporting it. The rumor says it's just a firmware flash for any of these cards to be an XT. I'm not sure of this rumor, but it seems plausible.
Don't forget the state hires Chicago residents to work in Springfield. Instead of forcing a relocation, pays $1400 a month for apartments in Springfield on top of salary and flies those people back and forth.
If only TheRod wasn't trying to be TheDonald, the state would be in fine shape.
Or buy my C64 complete with Commodore brand monitor, 1541 floppy drive, data cassette drive, joystick, modem (1200 bps!), and box of software. Nya. :-P
Seriously though, a straight A/V connection is much better than RF adapters.
Best Buy and other places sell big manually-switched multi-input boxes that have RF adapters built in, too. I've seen ones with as many as eight or ten inputs, four outputs, some with SVideo, some with component video, and even one with ethernet (why you wouldn't just buy a hub I don't know, but maybe people only want ethernet live to their xbox or ps/2 when actually using the console).
The whole idea of a patent is that the inventor publishes the invention. There's no reverse engineering of the patented portion of a system necessary.
That's the exchange made in the patent system --in trade for letting others know how you do something neat, you get to be the only one (or charge them to join you) using the neat trick for a certain number of years. Patented items are specifically not trade secrets. It's the law that protects them.
Granted, some people make their patent applications as vague as possible and try every way possible to get them extended. That's not the way the system was intended to work, though.
1) What's wrong with a set of filters for your streams of complicated objects?
2) You don't have to have common data formats. That's what filters are for -- to massage data into the form needed.
3) XML _is_ text.
4) EJB is scalable how? By running on top of an application foundation which trakes up more processor and memory than every other program on the box just to get started?
The Unix tool-based approach may not be perfect, but how "portable" do you really think EJB is? Ever tried running EJB on a microcontroller? Why not?
Research and licensing is a valid business model. If someone has a reasonable patent with reasonable work behind it, it makes sense that they'd protect it from use without a license.
It's the suits from companies that didn't actually do anything that piss me off.
If the license is invalid, then the work is still copyrighted, but without a license for anyone to use it. Therefore, if the GPL were held to be invalid, the right to distribute, make derivative works from, or make money from any software licensed by it would remain with the author, and only the author. IANAL, but this is pretty basic stuff.
I still use an EGA monitor with an EGA adapter on one of my old boxes, and I use it pretty regularly. It's a text-only system, so it doesn't matter much.
I still play games on my Commodore 64 with its Commodore composite monitor, which is basically just an A/V monitor. I don't really use the 64 for anything other than games, though.
Perl is not analogous to Basic. The difference between Java and Perl is more like Ada vs. C++ than assemnly vs. Basic. They are two languages of fairly equal level with different design goals. They are not one intimately connected to the hardware and one a dumbed-down language meant to teach to children and suits.
Both Scheme and Forth are powerful languages in small packages. Forth maps well onto embedded hardware, and runs quite efficiently. Both languages are usually, but not always, implemented with an interpreter. Compilation to machine code is sometimes done with both. Both languages are quite expressive, so an application's source can be kept small.
I'm not against Perl by any means. It's one of my favorite languages, and I use it for projects of many sizes. It's definitely not dead. I'd like to have it on my phone. I'm just not sure how many people will use it.
Yes, it's great policy to make people who buy their own equipment, pay for their own training, pay for their licenses, and must agree to use their own time and own private equipment for public service when necessary go out and pay for new training, new licenses, and new equipment just to keep the privileges they now have.
is it the defendant's job to prosecute himself?
The GPLed code in question _must_ be available to the user, per the GPL. A particular person may charge you to give it to you, but they must give you the _source_. Therefore, the software is unleashed from any one master. That's a valid definition of "free", and the one in which most Free Software supporters are interested.
Not all OSes are the same, because some manage computers more efficiently, and most do so in differing and incompatible ways outside a small family of related OSes. A Yugo and a Porsche are both cars, but they are not the same. A farm tractor and a bicycle are even less the same.
Using an OS and changing the source are two different things. You don't have to have the source to use an OS. Having the source does, however, make it much easier to improve it or customize it. No, you don't have to be a programmer to want to make a change to your OS. You can hire someone who is a programmer to make the change for you. Again, this is not necessarily an economic freedom (as in free beer), but a freedom to do something (as in free speech).
Stallman (often referred to as RMS), founder of the free software Foundation, never asserted that a thing cannot be property of its creator. He merely stated that when the cost of making a duplicate of that thing is essentially nil (as in someone being allowed to redistribute the source for a program) that in the long run it is better for society if the author doesn't charge for the additional copies. The value of the work should be covered by the impetus to create it in the first place. If you need it, write it. If you are paid to write it, write it. Then the code was paid for, and additional copies, taking no resources to make, could cost nothing. The body of software available to everyone could then be multiplied by the number of such releases. There of course are people who think it's outright wrong to patent or copyright anything. There are also people who believe in Scientology.
You make many assumptions and generalizations which are unfair. One of them is that everyone who supports Linux is a zealot. Frankly, I don't care if you use Linux or not. I do support the efforts of those who choose to use it and develop it. It's a choice. After all, "free" is about choice.
Think 'unbound', not 'gratis'. Go ahead, call RMS a hippy. He doesn't care. You can call me what you will, too. You are free to do that.
is that you don't have to trip through countless menus and windows to get to something a few keystrokes in a terminal window will do faster.
Pretty pictures for those who want it done easily, a terminal for those who want it done now (or more easily by a program). I like graphical interfaces for what they do well. I like command lines for what they do well.
With OS X, as with most other *nix implementations, I can have the best of both worlds.
If you carry it through with the epoxy still unset or just freshly set, it may cause them to pull you aside for a couple of minutes I guess.
I've never had a problem, as fully set epoxy isn't exactly considered pyrotechnic.
Right. You may have disproven that one can never prove a negative.
One caveat to those following along: although it may be possible to prove a negative in such a case, but not in all cases.
In the case of, say...
All squares are also rectangles.
Figure 1 is not a square.
Is Figure 1 a rectangle?
This boils down to:
If p then q.
~p
q?
So in cases that enough information exists, it may be possible to prove a negative. It isn't always possible to prove a negative.
Also, the example given assumes that one can prove ~q in order to prove ~p. Which in turn leads us to the original question: Can one prove a negative?
If q is false by definition, as in it stands for water being boiling and that water is actually frozen, then one could say it's false that the water is boiling and thereby say that it's false that the water's temperature is 100 degrees Celsius.
If q stands for something not so clear, then the example doesn't help much:
If Bob robbed the bank, Bob has had possession of a bunch of money.
Bob hasn't had possession of a bunch of money -- or has he?
Bob didn't rob the bank... or did he?
The issue here is that you are going to have a hard time proving that Bob hasn't had a bunch of money. Maybe it's hidden, and he's not spending it. Maybe it's already all spent, and you can't figure out what he spent it on. Maybe he gave it all away. If it is found that Bob has had a bunch of money, he could have converted it into other currency or could have earned it some other way. So you'd have to have an exhaustive search for the money, prove it was the money from the bank, and prove that Bob had at no time had possession of it to prove that Bob didn't rob the bank. So while logic may work, logistics will more likely be a hinderance than a help.
In general exhaustive methods make many things theoretically possible while doing little for feasibility.
So it's often not feasible to prove a negative.
My employer has many locations, most of which are retail shops. The particular niche of the business is not the point. The point here is that each store has point of sale systems. The POS boxen are swapped out every few years as depreciation and replacement part stocks dictate.
The old ones are still fast enough for productive use in a small office or home network, and employees can buy them really cheap. The official policy is that they are guaranteed not to work, and that you're lucky if everything operates. However, I've bought a few and have had no defects in any of them. One runs my home firewall and another is used for software minimum requirements testing for code I help develop. One was for a friend who, due to being a gull-time college student with barely any income, was stuck in the 486 days. The better ones except for needing video card upgrades meet minimum requirements for most of the Windows games currently on the market, although they fall well short of the cutting edge.
It's amazing what you can find if you know where to look. Within the last year, I built two working laptops from three parts machines. They were state government laptops which didn't have the newest I/O ports built in, and got sold at auction as-is. I bought the leftovers form the guy who purchased them at auction. Worked out great for both of us.
If all else fails, look at your local hardware store for something called Plumber's Putty. It looks like two-tone modeling clay or children's play putty. Work the two together with your fingers to form a slow-setting but very strong epoxy-like substance. It can be drilled, cut, sanded, or painted after being pressed into place and allowed to set completely. It even sets under water. I use this stuff on plastic, aluminum, steel, copper, ceramic, even stone. It'll join one type of material to another as long as they both work with the putty and you use the putty as a filler and not just a thin paste. It isn't always a pretty fix, but it usually dries to an offwhite or light gray color and can be covered with just about anything. I'm not sure how well Sharpie or other permanent markers work on it, but I'd be happy to test it sometime in one of my projects.
Anit-DARPA cooks?
As in, they like to use ingredients DARPA people are allergic to, or what?
I think if DARPA wants to limit entries, they should do so up front. It wouldn't be unusual for them to not ebven publicise the event and individually contact each organization who might be interested.
When a private company takes bids or opens a contest according to publicly disclosed rules then rewrites the rules without warning, that's a crime. DARPA should follow the rules set by the government for the people, even if it's not held to the same punishment for breaking the rules.
Uncompiled != Open Source
You can be sued, arrested, fined, and even jailed for reusing copyrighted code that has not been translated into machine code.
Stealing someone's expression of an idea displayed on a compouter terminal is no different from stealing someone's expression of an idea displayed on the pages of a book.
So when do they merge with SCO and get a huge foreign investment to pump up the stock prices?
You don't need a universally unique ID for the device.
What you need is a universally unique ID for the user. There's only one person with your email address. RADIUS realms uses the '@' to separate username from the realm. Since a realm is often the same as a domain anyway (although not always), this gives rise to an interesting idea.
Dialup ISPs have been doing limited roaming internally or among a limited number of ISPs partnered specifically for a larger roaming area for years. It's generally done with RADIUS using realms.
All a RADIUS server needs to do is to refer a request for a user in a realm it doesn't handle to the proper other RADIUS server, then forward back the response. Normally you must configure a RADIUS server with which other server is authoritative for which realm. There's no reason there couldn't be a TXT record in DNS that lists the authoritative RADIUS server for a realm that's the same as a domain name.
The other part is a bit more tricky -- the RADIUS server that is authoritative for the domain generally requires that the requesting device (an access server or another RADIUS server usually, but it could be a Linux box or whatever else that wants to speak RADIUS) be listed in advance, and that it shares a plaintext secret used for shared-key encryption.
Billing for usage-based access is often done straight from RADIUS login, logout, and traffic records anyway, so this part is easy.
What would need to be done is for public-key encryption to be used between devices (at least from oen RADIUS box to another or as an option -- it may be hard to get the firmware on certain access servers to do this) and for the authoritative RADIUS servers for one domain to be allowed to authenticate against another domain. With these fairly simple updates to the venerable protocol, it could allow universal roaming not just among dialups and among wireless ISPs, but even across those two types of entities. Then you still have the problem of getting deadbeat hotspot owners and ISP owners to pay for their roaming customers...
Note that cell companies don't all roam on everyone else's networks. There are a handful of networks, and there's coverage in most places by any particular carrier or at least one of their roaming partners. Some cell companies don't do roaming -- if you're off their network, you're out of luck.
So what's really needed is for ISPs and hotspot providers to sign mutual roaming contracts in the model adopted by the cell phone providers. Then, no changes to RADIUS would even be required.
It's often the fact that when you go to reinvent a wheel, it's simply because you didn't bother to see if that wheel existed already. This wheel's been in use a long time. Don't reinvent it.
It certainly wouldn't be a BSD license, which would allow their competitors to clsoe source it again.
It'd be either GPL (doubtful) or something like the Mozilla license under Netscape if it were to happen.
Picture something that allows other people to use and update the code, giving MS the control of the code submitted to them and that requires them to allow further copying of the contributed code but also lets them include it in their proprietary closed-source project along with code that's never been seen outside MS. That's about as Open Source as anyone could hope for from a company that is so scared of the idea.