An Argument for Why Windows Will Go Open Source • Hacker News Board

Re: An Argument for Why Windows Will Go Open Source

#41

Post by 8draco8 » Thu, Aug 31, 2017, 1:50 PM UTC

sigi45 wrote: post #28

TwoNineA wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stopped reading at "has caused Microsoft to develop operating systems that people wanted". - Telemetry. - Candy Crush. - Updates crammed down my throat. - ReFS removed from W10 Pro. - Still an OS that doesn't know if it's for touch or keyboard/mouse. The information density on Settings app for example is laughable on a 27 inch monitor. - Every major update used to reset search/privacy settings. But yeah, it's what…

It works. I can play games on it. I can play much more games on it and easier than on linux and macos. Lightroom runs on it. Everyone knows it. But still your comment doesn't even answer the comment you commented on. I use windows and arch linux and ubuntu. Like them all. And yes my arch linux i need to update anyway otherwise my chrome and kernel is out of date and insecure.

Your Windows installation is insecure full stop. No matter when you patched. Even if all vulnerabilities would be patched then there are still backdoors siting and waiting to be exploited.

Re: An Argument for Why Windows Will Go Open Source

#42

Post by romanovcode » Thu, Aug 31, 2017, 1:51 PM UTC

TwoNineA wrote: post #25

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #21

Seems like there are some good arguments here for making Windows free (as in beer) but open source? I don't get it.

I stopped reading at "has caused Microsoft to develop operating systems that people wanted". - Telemetry. - Candy Crush. - Updates crammed down my throat. - ReFS removed from W10 Pro. - Still an OS that doesn't know if it's for touch or keyboard/mouse. The information density on Settings app for example is laughable on a 27 inch monitor. - Every major update used to reset search/privacy settings. But yeah, it's what…

Do you realise that 99% of consumers are not IT related?

This means that 95% of people who own windows do not care about all the issues you pointed out. I subtracted 4% because some people do not like the telemetry and maybe 0.001% dislike the fact that candy-crush is pre-installed.

Re: An Argument for Why Windows Will Go Open Source

#43

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 31, 2017, 1:54 PM UTC

Vendan wrote: post #22

bfred_it wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Open source" is very generic, it literally just means "Not closed/private source." Nothing else about redistribution and restrictions is implied. For that there are specific licenses, which the article didn't mention.

It's not open source unless it's an open source license, and it's not an open source license unless it meets https://opensource.org/osd-annotated . You are referring to "source available". Please stop conflating the two.

[deleted]

Re: An Argument for Why Windows Will Go Open Source

#44

Post by yodsanklai » Thu, Aug 31, 2017, 1:55 PM UTC

auggierose wrote: post #10

Lol. That is not going to happen. When I was working on a project that required access to the Windows source code, the security hoops I had to jump through were ridiculous. Can't see them abandoning all that nice security machinery.

Actually, I worked in such a project a long time ago and I had the opposite feeling. They just gave us a few cds with the code on it. There were some restrictions as who could use it and so on, but it seems they didn't really care.

Re: An Argument for Why Windows Will Go Open Source

#45

Post by cat199 » Thu, Aug 31, 2017, 1:58 PM UTC

b4ux1t3 wrote: post #26

Vendan wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not open source unless it's an open source license, and it's not an open source license unless it meets https://opensource.org/osd-annotated . You are referring to "source available". Please stop conflating the two.

Can you blame us? This is largely a subjective matter, and the different organizations who talk about this kind of thing have often-conflicting ideologies about how all this works. When I hear "open source", I don't know which camp the speaker is sitting in. It's perfectly reasonable to get mixed up sometimes.

While it is a subjective matter when looking from the outside, the OSI consortium did a pretty good job of bringing in all of the various groups conventionally referred to as 'open source' and getting the various definitions pinned down in a way that seems to accurately reflect the broad spectrum of possibilities, even to the point that non-open-source companies use their definitions.

While I agree one can still certainly debate the legitimacy of this situation if one so desires, it's pretty much consensus 'within the literature' that the OSI definitions 'are correct' at this pont..

Re: An Argument for Why Windows Will Go Open Source

#46

Post by sevensor » Thu, Aug 31, 2017, 1:58 PM UTC

b4ux1t3 wrote: post #14

sevensor wrote: post #9

> have to lose for making Windows open source and requiring people to pay to use win32 apps? Surely, if Windows is open source, we can port Wine to it and run all the win32 executables we want? Wine already runs old Windows programs better than Windows does.

No, it really doesn't. Windows has had backwards compatibility as a huge priority for a long time, often to their detriment. You can literally update a machine from Windows 3.1 to windows 10, and programs written for Windows 3.1 will still work.[1] [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPnehDhGa14 EDIT: TO be clear, this is a video of upgrading to Windows 7, and there is a direct upgrade path to 10 from 7. Also, as pe…

Both WoW64 and Wine provide an environment that pretends to be 32-bit Windows and presents the Win32 API, but neither one is actually Windows XP. I've had pretty similar experiences trying to run old win32 games on both systems (i.e. it's hit or miss) but Wine has the significant advantage that it will allow a program to think it has admin privileges when it doesn't. Also under Wine, I've had better luck running games from ISOs I've ripped, where I have to insert an actual CD in a physical drive for the program to run under Windows.

Re: An Argument for Why Windows Will Go Open Source

#47

Post by d44m » Thu, Aug 31, 2017, 1:58 PM UTC

8draco8 wrote: post #41

sigi45 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works. I can play games on it. I can play much more games on it and easier than on linux and macos. Lightroom runs on it. Everyone knows it. But still your comment doesn't even answer the comment you commented on. I use windows and arch linux and ubuntu. Like them all. And yes my arch linux i need to update anyway otherwise my chrome and kernel is out of date and insecure.

Your Windows installation is insecure full stop. No matter when you patched. Even if all vulnerabilities would be patched then there are still backdoors siting and waiting to be exploited.

So is your Android, iOS, macOS and every linux flavour out there. What's so special about Windows being insecure?

Re: An Argument for Why Windows Will Go Open Source

#48

Post by pksadiq » Thu, Aug 31, 2017, 2:01 PM UTC

> Microsoft has publicly stated that Windows 10 will be the last product in the Windows line.

This may be because:

  1. Cloud is where the money is.
  2. Maintaining an OS is a lot of burden (Hardware drivers,
  patents, tie ups with several hardware/software vendors,
  developer cost, and so on)

So the simple thing they can consider is to ditch the OS, and develop platform independent solutions. Gradually this will (hopefully) happen.

Releasing the OS source will be too much costly (cleaning back doors, lots of code smell, and so on). This will cause too many people vulnerable to attacks. And that can't happen.

So no, Windows won't go open source.

Re: An Argument for Why Windows Will Go Open Source

#49

Post by pgeorgi » Thu, Aug 31, 2017, 2:36 PM UTC

yuhong wrote: post #6

pgeorgi wrote: post #5

So the author has some commentary on operating system code licensing with no understanding on open source licenses (that bit about charging money for the source code and "piracy", see other comments here) or proprietary development habits (randomly licensing bits and pieces from third parties when they're no differentiator and too onerous to develop in-house) Unless those third party licenses allow for redistribution…

Third party code would be mostly a problem for XP and older with things like HyperTerminal and Pinball. Even for MS they were a problem: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20080225-00/?p=...

With OpenSolaris, there was some l10n code in libc that they weren't able to get clearance for some reason.

Windows has ~30 years of legacy. There are probably some bits of Adobe code in font rendering - although at least in this case, Adobe still exists so at least it's possible to call somebody to try to negotiate.

If there's some significant piece of code in some ancient video codec (to pick some silly example) that came from a third party in the late 90s who then went under, it'll be a mess to track down if there's even anybody who needs to be called.

Now, such a codec is well isolated: "Free Windows doesn't support the AncientCrapware4Windows codec. Does anybody care?", but what if some fundamental parts of the shell was licensed back then and dragged forward all those years?

It's the long tail that hurts and just checking _if_ there's anything to do is lots of legal work that scales by lines of code (and OpenSolaris was tiny compared to Windows). For a product that (as the article claims) approaches a retail value of $0, that's a steep investment.

Re: An Argument for Why Windows Will Go Open Source

#50

Post by pgeorgi » Thu, Aug 31, 2017, 2:52 PM UTC

b4ux1t3 wrote: post #8

Flimm wrote: post #3

> Also note that Microsoft will still be able to charge money for the open source code because there's no reason that you can’t other than piracy concerns, and due to the increased legal scrutiny corporations tend not to pirate products, unlike the general public. Yes, Microsoft will still be able to charge money for the open source code, but if the code is open source, other people will be able to distribute it free…

Open source does not mean you are free to distribute the code, necessarily. It literally just means that the code is available for inspection. Paid-for open source software isn't a new thing. You're thinking of _free_ open source software. While I'm not a huge FOSS-head, there is a distinct difference between "_free_ and open source" and just "open source". It's all in the licensing. I could, in theory, write a licen…

> While I'm not a huge FOSS-head, there is a distinct difference between "_free_ and open source" and just "open source". It's all in the licensing

"Free Software" and "Open Source" mean pretty much the same as far as the practices, motions and licenses are concerned (but people insist there are huge differences in terms of philosophy). "Free and Open Source Software" is just a new-ish term that includes either team to stop the whining.

"Open Source" was a mostly unused term in the software licensing field before 1998 or the people at OSI who drafted the Open Source Definition likely would have gone for something else.

"Shared source" was introduced by Microsoft a couple years later and is a pretty descriptive term for those less liberal licenses (where sharing code happens outside the criteria of the OSD).

Why not just go with that instead of arguing why people should use a term to mean something different? There was an effort to do just that, by Microsoft, to muddy the waters, before they settled on "shared source", which might be why you get those harsh responses.