Microsoft Could One Day Potentially Open-Source Windows

[birdie]

10 or 15 years ago, that would have been interesting and potentially useful. Today, it's like PalmOS going open source. There might be some interesting corner cases for WINE to further improve compatibility but on the whole it doesn't seem that valuable to me. Desktops are dying while Android, ChromeOS, and iOS are becoming the predominant end user computing devices. Linux has the back-end processing. Windows is the POTS of the computing world; the long tail of historical usage.

What weed are you smoking? Tablets are only good for getting content off the web, but they totally suck in regard to creating anything of value.

No designer, architect, web designer, engineer, anyone who does anything remotely productive will ever use these stupid fondle slabs.

Desktop is not going anywhere. It's dying only in the fevered imagination of Apple fanboys who believe that the iPad is the pinnacle of computing. It's not. On the contrary it's at the bottom of computing.

[corzo]

"We're having a hard time removing all those NSA proprietary code from our product. Once we get rid of those parts, we may one day release the source"

[Sonadow]

What weed are you smoking? Tablets are only good for getting content off the web, but they totally suck in regard to creating anything of value.

No designer, architect, web designer, engineer, anyone who does anything remotely productive will ever use these stupid fondle slabs.

Desktop is not going anywhere. It's dying only in the fevered imagination of Apple fanboys who believe that the iPad is the pinnacle of computing. It's not. On the contrary it's at the bottom of computing.

Depends on the operating system powering the tablet.

I have used (and still occasionally use) my first-generation Surface RT as a work machine. And it does the job rather well. Office + Outlook preloaded, TeamViewer for remote access, a metro app from the app store for SSH access, and a microHDMI-out to connect to a monitor. Paired with a bluetooth keyboard and mouse and I'm good to go.

And I work in tech support.

[dungeon]

Well and Linux could one day potentionally go more closed source

[rabcor]

You sound like Linux is already more advanced than Windows. Strangely this Open Source OS still occupies just 1% of PCs in the world, maybe because Linux is one big mess.

Nah, Microsoft won't release Windows source code any time soon, unless they create a new OS from scratch or they go bankrupt or die of other causes. They still haven't released the source code for absolutely irrelevant MS-DOS (ntvdm is the only remnant of it in 32bit Windows).

No it's just that right now I prefer linux, my major reasons as you may be able to guess are the customization. But yes I agree, linux is a total mess, but what I meant is that this mess could be fixed by the time Microsoft would seriously consider open sourcing windows. I'm estimating it will only take us 5 years tops to get there. (Unlike the open source community as a whole, HP has standards, they're developing a linux based "machine-OS", this could end up having a significant impact on Linux's messiness and it's low market share)

But damn that is a huge list, and I'm sad to see I agree with practically everything on it. It's a really good list, this should be looked at thoroughly by people like Canonical, RedHat and the suse guys.

[Passso]

No designer, architect, web designer, engineer, anyone who does anything remotely productive will ever use these stupid fondle slabs.

I saw a lot of videos on TV where I see those people do their critical job on iPad.
This is an evidence that a tablet can now transform the world into the greatest experience ever.

Maybe one day we could save the dolphin and help elephants to empale bad people who want to steal their ivory, and whales will be so happy because we can actually change the world with new tablets.

Who knows, we live in such a beautiful world, a few milliseconds ago I read on a serious website that "Microsoft Could One Day Potentially Open-Source Windows". The world is changing... oh yeah, it is changing so fast.

[curaga]

I suppose I'd read it to see how fucked up it was, but no doubt the released version will be all kinds of cleaned up, bleached and with make-up.

[rohcQaH]

Great. Please start by open sourcing anything related to media DRM, driver signing, bootloader signing and anything crypto related.

What? Those are not the parts you meant? I'm not interested then.

[dimko]

For what it's worth, Microsoft released the source code to huge portions of the XP kernel under educational licenses.

That said, I don't expect them to ever release Windows, or even parts of it, under any open source licenses. Too many outside developers will seize the chance to propose major API and ABI breakage with every release and I'm certain Microsoft will have none of that.

It's up to Microsoft to decide, which API they will adopt for future versions. Forkers can decide for themselves, but no one will adopt forked versions of MS products.

[andyprough]

10 or 15 years ago, that would have been interesting and potentially useful. Today, it's like PalmOS going open source. There might be some interesting corner cases for WINE to further improve compatibility but on the whole it doesn't seem that valuable to me. Desktops are dying while Android, ChromeOS, and iOS are becoming the predominant end user computing devices. Linux has the back-end processing. Windows is the POTS of the computing world; the long tail of historical usage.

Sorry, but Android, Chrome web apps and iOS apps are total crap in my experience. However, it depends on your usage. I work with huge batches of PDFs, word processor documents, and spreadsheets. Mobile platform tools for document processing are beyond pathetic.