31–40 of 225 posts
I see a lot of “why not” but no actual “why”. Microsoft loses strategic platform control and gains: ... crickets
I suggested on Mini-Microsoft about 10 years ago that Microsoft do an 'Apple'. Apple took a free OS from BSD and put their own GUI over the top of it. I suggested that MSFT do the same sort of thing, that being to put their Windows GUI on top of the Linux OS instead of using the Linux X11 GUIs. This had the advantage that the underlying OS base would no longer need maintaining by Microsoft, and all their coding effor…
So yes, giving up entirely on the good things that Windows does without respect to the GUI and accepting the practices of Linux/Unix devs who have little or no respect for the past would be nothing short of a catastrophic mistake. Your idea would likely have killed computing forever, in my view, especially enterprise or professional-use computing, and within the first two rapid releases that broke necessary functions. It's the so-called 'Softies' who keep the world running and effective for normal people who don't want to have to figure out how to compile a program just to turn on their computer and do the things they need.
And it would have killed home use as well - we don't need network workstations at home with limited control, we need computers that we have full control over, all the time.
No. They just plan to use developer tools (chrome based browser + vstudio) to push their one-push-publish-to-cloud. embrace (chromium), extend (dev tool features that will only work with vsStudio but is awesome), extinguish (tool now only work with vsstudio when serving from azure because they are moving faster than open standards.)
If handled well, a community would blossom around "NT," with multiple "unofficial" distros (maybe one with full POSIX compatibility), and lots and lots of happy developers. If things went really well, they might even achieve the resources necessary to create Windows Phone 2.0.
Microsoft could still make money from consumer/enterprise support plans (i.e. AppleCare), and via commissions on sales in the Windows app store. And an open-source Windows could lead to growth as a cloud OS, driving revenue for MS Azure.
Open sourcing the Windows kernel would be the ultimate culmination of Microsoft's turnaround, and IMHO a fair penance for evil deeds past. Nothing could do more to invigorate the open-source community. I would be so delighted I might even start to use Bing! It's never going to happen, but it is a very pleasant dream. Far better than "One Kernel to Rule them All!"
I suggested on Mini-Microsoft about 10 years ago that Microsoft do an 'Apple'. Apple took a free OS from BSD and put their own GUI over the top of it. I suggested that MSFT do the same sort of thing, that being to put their Windows GUI on top of the Linux OS instead of using the Linux X11 GUIs. This had the advantage that the underlying OS base would no longer need maintaining by Microsoft, and all their coding effor…
That would have been the end of me using computers, right then and there. An operating system that updates or upgrades more than about once per decade is moving entirely too fast. 5 years about the fastest possible rate that even approaches being reasonable. The fact that Windows has always bent over backwards to provide backward compatibility would be totally invalidated by shifting toward Linux. I run a bunch of DO…
looks at the state of desktop computing
..and yet, here we are.
I suggested on Mini-Microsoft about 10 years ago that Microsoft do an 'Apple'. Apple took a free OS from BSD and put their own GUI over the top of it. I suggested that MSFT do the same sort of thing, that being to put their Windows GUI on top of the Linux OS instead of using the Linux X11 GUIs. This had the advantage that the underlying OS base would no longer need maintaining by Microsoft, and all their coding effor…
I'd like to use linux, and install it from time to time, but am always eventually worn down by problems, some trivial & some less so, that could mostly be solved, but at the cost of research & fiddling time I'm not interested in spending. The issues largely fall into two categories - missing software, and missing or undercooked hardware support. If Microsoft did signal to the market an increased long-term support for…
I'd love to see real competition in the OS space for people who need both a decent app ecosystem and open source developer tools.
Here's a dopey idea: What if Microsoft open-sourced the Windows NT kernel? (While retaining some proprietary drivers, etc..) If handled well, a community would blossom around "NT," with multiple "unofficial" distros (maybe one with full POSIX compatibility), and lots and lots of happy developers. If things went really well, they might even achieve the resources necessary to create Windows Phone 2.0. Microsoft could s…
You'll see Microsoft open source new things as they go, and probably smaller components as they rework them, but I doubt you'll ever see a truly fully open source Windows, just because of the amount of work involved.
If it happens, it would be the most jaw dropping event of the decade. But MS has a room to keep their own ecosystem as losing it will have less diversity as we've seen when they dropped Edge not to mention the world will come to a halt without Windows that can run apps from the last 20 years. Having a UNIX kernel at the core would be really nice which would make developers easy to port apps between OS but how would t…