Microsoft Could One Day Potentially Open-Source Windows

[anarki2]

Honestly, if they completely open sourced Windows, I'd go straight back to it right now, but when they would finally consider doing such a thing, it'll already be too late as Linux will probably have advanced way beyond windows at that point.

Yeah, right. Linux is so advanced right now, except sound/vga/wifi drivers are buggy/nonexistent and your game may run properly if you have the right combo of distro + kernel + xorg + mesa + vga driver + insert_random_sw_component_here versions and the stars are aligned. Awesome desktop environment indeed.

ATM I have a 3 years old WiFi stick. Its current support status is "unplanned". Before that stick I had another several years old stick, with the same problem. Advanced, yeah. And that's only WiFi, I'm even gonna explain how atrociously supported the other components in my comp are.

Really what I'm liking on linux is the customizability, if I could just edit the source code for windows to customize it to my needs (or even download custom desktop environments developed by other people on Windows) there'd be little reason left for me to stay on Linux.

Cool, except for that you need APIs not the code behind the APIs. You do have the APIs. Have you ever checked any Windows APIs? Apparently not. Actually, I think you simply don't know how programming works in general.

Guess what, it works this way on Linux, too. In fact, on ANY OS. I'll go further, there ARE alternative shells for Windows, yeah, you could even make your own. Except noone gives a rat's ass about them. Simply open sourcing Windows won't automagically implement alternative shells over the SAME APIs.

Instead of this bullcr@p, they should rather make it easier for contributors to develop and update drivers for legacy, unsupported hardware on current Windows releases. That would actually be helpful.

[rice_nine]

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.

Ladies and gentlemen...

Workstations.

That is all.

[hrkristian]

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.

This is irony right? Guys?

[Staffan]

I've heard this claim before but I find it extremely unlikely. Windows is one of the two cash cows for Microsoft (the other one being Office). It's what keeps the company profitable, most other business areas of theirs just barely makes a profit or makes a loss (except Office that is). Add to that the lock-in effect of Windows, it's a vital product for them to base all their other products on. No, Windows will not go fully open source, at least not until Microsoft as a company is about to go bust.

[belal1]

we don't need an open-source windows

what we need is a very CHEAP windows subscription. I'd be happy to pay $20 a year for access to 3 licenses of windows if it means it comes without all the crapware that's normally installed and includes updates and what not. I'd also like it to tie very closely with skydrive so that like chromeOS, my data that I choose, is up in a secured vault for my own self. Why don't I want an open-source windows? because I like the fact that a single company has some control over the backwards compatibility of windows and not a bunch of individuals who disagree with each other and forks their version. I like the fact that I can take my old windows applications, install it in windows 7, and it still works. For that to happen, someone's gotta get paid to do the job and that's why a subscription model works but it has to be CHEAP enough so that people actually don't mind paying for it, a la netflix which is so cheap for what you get that people like myself don't mind shelling the sub $10 a month fee.

[Staffan]

what we need is a very CHEAP windows subscription. I'd be happy to pay $20 a year for access to 3 licenses of windows if it means it comes without all the crapware that's normally installed and includes updates and what not.

All those crapware is the reason why Windows comes preloaded "for free" and Linux does not. Despite the cost of the OEM license Windows is actually as cheap or cheaper than Linux for the computer manufacturers because they get sponsor deals to add this crap in the pre-install, something they don't get when pre-loading Linux.

Microsoft of course has no interest in lowering the prices when they have 90% of the market.

[birdie]

...

Where's the LIKE button when you need it? I relish seeing sane people here.

[triune]

Chromebooks

I keep reading that 40-50% of laptops being sold today (to schools in the USA) at Chromebooks. Given that ChromeOS can run any version of Linux inside a window via Crouton is utterly amazing in an of itself. This week you can now run (or soon will be able to) every Android app (1,700,000+) in existence.

Could someone tell me who wouldn't want to use a Chromebook/box/base with ample hardware? I'm still waiting for a "pixel class" Chromebox to make my primary workstation that I can just Chrome Remote Desktop into all my other machines.

[vadix]

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.

You assume Microsoft wont get a sizable portion of the tablet market, which they will.

[sarmad]

I don't mind using closed source software, and I don't mind paying for them, but I'm still using Linux exclusively. The problem with Windows is more than the openness of its source code.