What if Microsoft went Open Source? 409
An anonymous reader writes "This article on newsforge takes a speculative look at what would have to happen if Microsoft decided to jump on the Open Source bandwagon (using Microsoft Project as the source of speculation). Amusing to think about, unlikely to happen."
Give it up (Score:5, Insightful)
MS is doing just fine without being OS!
Re:Give it up (Score:5, Insightful)
So
Why can't a company be open source and sell its product for profit? What's wrong with this?
Re:Give it up (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Give it up (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Give it up (Score:3, Interesting)
I can't see why people equate selling source code with allowing unrestricted distribution. Binaries are no harder
Re:Give it up (Score:4, Interesting)
Opening up commercial source code may also result in trade secrets being compromised. Even if a company spends months or years developing, coding, and testing a revolutionary feature, it will all be for naught when a competitor comes along and duplicates it all in one fell swoop.
And, yes, companies such as Microsoft would lose power and control if they released source to applications such as Word. If Word's source became available today, there is no doubt that Microsoft would lose an enormous amount of clout and revenue. It's a lose-lose situation for them. It may be temporary good news for the open source community if such a thing happens, but be rest assured, the software industry would take a huge financial hit if it did so. There would be no temptation for Microsoft to make DOC formats, for Adobe to make PDF's and PSD's, or Macromedia to make SVF's.
I just do not see how simply releasing the code to commercial products will benefit the big companies out there, regardless if there are strict licenses on the source itself.
Re:Give it up (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Give it up (Score:5, Interesting)
So your customer could, in theory, resell yout product. However, they would probbly not be able to support it. I mean, that is the reason for picking MS in business, isn't it? You *know* MS will be around to support your product.
Additionally, look at Trolltech (produce Qt). they have a GPL product (Qt), but it's GPL. If you include the code in your product (even just by dynamic linking), your product MUST be GPL'd too. Most businesses don't want to do that, but they have to option of buying a non-GPL version which they can use. They have to pay Trolltech for this, so they make money.
Easy-peasy.
Re:Give it up (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe it's an impulse buy. Maybe it's a present to another geek. Maybe you actually needed someone to tell you this....
Kierthos
Re:Give it up (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Give it up (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Give it up (Score:5, Funny)
That's not true! There would still be Anime and cool gadgets! Not to mention Soviet Russia, "all your base", and Beowulf clusters
Oh yes, and still all the OS news, scientific news, and so on....I guess :D
MS...sorry, I mean...M$ bashing isn't what /. is all about, it's just the funnest part ;)
Netscape/Mozilla (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Netscape/Mozilla (Score:4, Funny)
The term 'mental masturbation' comes to mind.
Im gonna grab some hand lotion and imagine what would happen if Pam Anderson found me attractive...
Re:Netscape/Mozilla (Score:5, Insightful)
Fact: The staff can't possibley address them all in real time
Fact: They do manage to address a large number of them
Fact: IE has lots of bugs
Fact: THe staff can't possibley address them all in real time
Fact: They usually just ignore bugs until b\they become a CRITICAL vulnerability. And even then it can take months to address.
Re:Netscape/Mozilla (Score:3, Insightful)
Fact? sounds more like a baseless claim made from anecdotal evidence. Does the poster really know what usually happens when the the IE team encounters a bug in their code? I highly doubt it. I think its much more likely when the IE team encounters a bug it usually gets fixed and patched without anyone knowing. Not all bugs can lead to vulnerabilities, or for that matter are ev
Re:Netscape/Mozilla (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure it wouldn't take Mozilla developers so long if they started from an old, working codebase, made it for just one platform, and had thousands of bright and experienced developers working for them like Microsoft does. What's truly amazing is that the quality of MS products is so low, given their incredible resources.
Re:Netscape/Mozilla (Score:3, Informative)
Windows, Mac, Unix. I count three.
Re:Netscape/Mozilla (Score:5, Insightful)
When something is rewritten from scratch, it takes a couple of years to get to where one left off (especially if one is going to write ones own gui toolkit, bug query system and various other apps). In the long run, I think it was worth it, but in the short term, no results are obvious because much of coding is to get to what was already done.
IE was not rebuilt from scratch in this time and thus could continue with incremental improvements of what MS already had.
In the long run I think Mozilla will take over the Web (simply because anyone can customize and improve it) but it was understandably slow at first. Now that the gui toolkit is robust and stable [XUL] and the core systems are working properly, I expect improvments from the mozilla team to be relatively faster.
Re:Netscape/Mozilla (Score:5, Insightful)
Contrast that with IE where none of these things are possible. Got a bug? Good luck trying to raise and track the issue with Microsoft.
Re:Netscape/Mozilla (Score:5, Funny)
#
I think that's the biggest reason we want Microsoft to make Office Open Source...
Re: What if Microsoft went Open Source? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: What if Microsoft went Open Source? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: What if Microsoft went Open Source? (Score:5, Funny)
What if? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What if? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What if? (Score:4, Interesting)
What's tha dilly?
Brandon
Re:What if? (Score:4, Interesting)
don't you get sick of it?
one more MS feature to kill (Score:2, Funny)
Uh...yeah... (Score:5, Funny)
What if they went Open Source? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What if they went Open Source? (Score:3, Insightful)
A reason (Score:5, Interesting)
So while MS could open lots of source, there would be quite a few holes in it, and all the geeks who bothered to look would be wondering what was up with the swiss cheese.
Re:A reason (Score:2, Informative)
(If this is too obscure, check openoffice.org.)
Re:A reason (Score:5, Informative)
Defragger??? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Defragger??? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:A reason (Score:5, Insightful)
And nobody says that you can't fill the holes in swiss sourcecode.
Re:A reason (Score:3, Insightful)
I can think of three.
One: A legal force (change in copyright law, antitrust suit, etc) compels them to.
Two: A radical fragmenting hardware shift catches them off guard, and they need to very very quickly cover every new platform.
Three: Their main product matures to the point where further development isn't cost-effective, they stop version incrementing, and "Open Source" to allo
On a similiar vein (Score:4, Funny)
What if we lived in the year 3000?
What if Russia had not become a communist state?
What if the moon turns out to be the home of our overlord and master?
What if I became Pope?
All of these things have something in common. Can you spot what that is? Yes, they're all based on pure fantasy!
Re:On a similiar vein (Score:4, Funny)
What If The Hulk Had Killed Wolverine ?
What If Daredevil Had Killed The Kingpin ?
What If The Punisher Became An Agent Of S.H.I.E.L.D. ?
What If New York Had Become Ka-Zar's Savage Land ... Forever ?
Re:On a similiar vein (Score:5, Funny)
Re:On a similiar vein (Score:4, Funny)
Oh wait, that didn't work.
Microsoft Open Source (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Microsoft Open Source (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right of course that it will never happen, but Open Source Windoze would be useful since it would make it easier to create Windoze emulation environments and would remove any need to purchase Windoze to run Windoze-only apps.
What if.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Unlikely... Impossible
Re:What if....Open Source Correction (Score:2, Funny)
Unlikely... Impossible
Are you just stupid? America isn't run by oligarhic oportunists, America is really and truly an Oligarchy, which means it is run by oligarchic opportunists... Jumping Jeebus! Learn to spell!
Not to mention it is not only run by oligarchs, but these oligarchs are also aristocrats. So we are an Aristocracy in addition to an Oligarchy.
Jumping Jeebus! Get the facts straight!
Re:What if.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Democracy sucks.
That why America is a Democratic Republic.
Big difference
Re:What if.... (Score:5, Interesting)
scripsit SensitiveMale:
Why do Americans get so hung up on this? I don't get it.
Republic == ``res publica'', Latin for (roughly) the populus (people) is in charge
Democracy == ``dimokratia'', Greek for (roughly) the dimos (people) is in charge
In modern Greek, the word for republic is ``dimokratia'' (as in ``Elliniki Dimokratia'' -- Greek Republic).
You can play semantic games all you want, but the terms have no inherent difference in meaning. If you want to split hairs, you need to provide definitions. FWIW, the difference betwen the Roman and Athenian models (hence, I assume, the hair-splitting) is pretty small. The Romans said the senators were representatives of the people, but they were the heads of the most powerful families. The Greeks said that all citizens participated directly, but restricted citizenship to the heads of the most powerful families. 6 == half dozen.
If MS went OSS... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:If MS went OSS... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:If MS went OSS... (Score:5, Funny)
EGON : "Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light."
RAY (awed): "Complete protonic reversal."
VENKMAN: "OK, That's bad. Good safety tip; thanks Egon."
No interest (Score:5, Insightful)
I picture in my mind, many gleeful hackers and an overwhelming wave of new exploits, that might in fact cause more people to switch to Linux, where the support community is much more on top of things, and a reliable infrastructure is in place.
Re:No interest (Score:3, Insightful)
There would be far more interest than Linux has. Remember, 20 times more people use Windows. There are probably at least 20 times more developers for Windows. Even if only a fraction of them offer bug fixes, they come out ahead (remember, only a fraction of Linux users submit any bug fixes).
I actually think opening the source (but not GPL) is the way to go for MS. They open their source for view
What if ... (Score:2, Funny)
What if editors stopped reposts ?
What if CmdrTaco choice disappeared from polls ?
What if? (Score:3, Interesting)
What would happen if M$ went Open Source?
I'm pretty sure these [jericho-underhill.com] would form in this place [virginia.edu].
Can't and won't (Score:5, Informative)
OTOH, Windows could follow Apple's lead, and use Linux or BSD as a starting point for their next-generation OS. The problem with that idea is that it doesn't really match MS's current goals of DRM, software leases, and increasing MS's revenues.
(I RTFA the day it was published.)
Re:Can't and won't (Score:3, Funny)
Microsoft Project got beat to Open Source (Score:4, Informative)
Competition! (Score:5, Insightful)
Various word processors (e.g. KOffice [koffice.org]) and other programs would snag the code and, thus, be able to perfectly handle MS Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, etc. Imagine that! Competition in the marketplace!
Faced with such competition, MS would have no choice but to change its business model for Office. MS could no longer make a profit directly from Office. MS would have to figure out how to make a profit indirectly from Office.
Goodbye. Me am bizzarro gates (Score:3, Funny)
Hello.
If Microsoft went Open Source... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:If Microsoft went Open Source... (Score:2, Interesting)
Then a giant bong will appear in the sky... (Score:4, Funny)
The guy forgot to mention all the money Microsoft will make selling t-shirts and Project stuffed animals (featuring Projie the Scheduling Salamander). The backbone of any open source business plan.
- adam
Mu (Score:5, Funny)
Q: Does the dog have the Buddha nature?
A: Mu
Microsoft and Open Source are on completely different planes of existence, and as such combining them in any sort of comparison is pointless.
Note: The above is intended as humor.
Re:Mu (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, Windows incorporates quite a bit of open code: MS is perfectly happy to take projects under a lenient license a la BSD and absorb them. I seem to recall that the TCP/IP stack in Windows owes some things to BSD licensed code. They finally started properly acknowledging those contributions in XP -- I'm not sure where it is exactly, but I have it on good re
Not likely due to current business model (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact, the security issue is one that has, time and again, been proven by Microsoft to be sorely lacking precisely due to their business model and reliance on the front-end revenue stream. With all this cash in the bank, how is it possible for Microsoft not to quickly respond to their customers and push out patches within 24 hours of understanding the problem? Even if some company were to set up a "special" service contract at some ridiculous price, I would be willing to bet that any security patches developed under that model would not be widely distributed and would be under NDA until such time as Microsoft saw fit to repair the problems for everyone.
In short, Microsoft simply wants to have its cake and eat it too, but that simply can't last forever.
While this most likely would never happen... (Score:5, Insightful)
On a more serious note, MS could acutally open up, say, the Win XP kernel to the public. The kernel doesn't do the brunt of the OS work; it's kind of the foundation, not the building. That way, MS couldn't be acused of being monopoilistic, but they could be monopolistic in practice.
Also, maybe we could see some Win XP clones? For free? Of course that right there is why MS wouldn't open up a current version of Windows, but they could open up, say, Win 95. Of course, knowing hackers, there probably would be a free version of Windows out in 6 months, and MS would (eventually) be undercut by boxed versions of this "free Windows".
MS couldn't open up Windows. Even if developers couldn't _use_ the code from Windows, they could read it so they could create a free version of Windows in ~3 years. And then they'd undercut MS's price, and eventually MS would go out of business.
Of course this very scenario may happen with WINE + Linux. But, of course, this is going to take time. If MS opened up Windows, they would only speed the process.
And Bill doesn't want that, now does he?
Re:While this most likely would never happen... (Score:5, Insightful)
No. Showing the Windows sourcecode to the WINE developers is a bad thing. So bad, in fact, that the WINE developers actively avoid it.
This is so that MS can't claim that they saw the code and simply copied it. Of course, if it were made legal for them to see it, I still doubt that they'd go for it... MS might change their minds later and decide to sue them into oblivion for having inside knowledge of the code...
I think a better question is.... (Score:5, Interesting)
would the OSS/FS community be able to handle that ?
and would anyone help them out ?
(assuming that, let's say it's released under GPL or BSD style licenses)
Not really a full-fledged scenario (Score:2, Insightful)
What if the developers of MS project left Microsoft and started their own OpenProject, Inc? One of the things that keeps developers working for the company that makes the software they write is that they just can't take the code, walk out, and start their own company with it. But now it's GPL, so these developers have no reason to stick around if they think they can
Oh the humanity... (Score:4, Funny)
Something like this is too hard to speculate. (Score:5, Insightful)
The same thing will probably happen with Microsoft. A huge business like that does not change overnight. It is doubtful that we see any changes until it is too late. Proprietary businesses no matter how good will eventually lose out to 3rd parties. There is a window in businesses like IBM and Microsoft. When that time is up, they will get hit hard.
IBM at one time was completely proprietary. Piece by piece 3rd party manufacturers replaced IBM hardware. Eventually IBM clones were around and could compete with IBM directly. Over a span of less than 10 years IBM lost most if it's desktop market share. Now IBM doesn't even bother with consumer hardware. The last couple of things to go were videocards and hard drives. Companies like NVIDIA and ATI were innovators and blew by IBM in the videocard market. Then the IBM hard drives began to get chinsey and they discontinued that as well.
I am speculating that the same thing with Microsoft is going to occur. Right now there are competing office suites, desktop os', web browsers etc. These products will eventually replace the need for Microsoft products one by one as more people use them. In a matter of years more people will be using open/free software and look back to the days of Microsoft and either laugh or feel dread and angst. The days of a software proprietary model are limited and if Microsoft and other companies don't change to accept opensource, then they will ultimately lose their market shares.
Re:Something like this is too hard to speculate. (Score:3, Insightful)
People buy what the CompUSA, BestBuy, insert-electronic-store-here salesperson tells them to buy, that will be Windows until the hardware manufacturers realize it would be in their best interests to stop supporting MS and the electronic s
Sure (Score:2, Flamebait)
And Microsoft continues to be the Evil Empire because they're undermining their competitors and being a monopoly, etc.
Coming soon - Slashdot stories bashing "M$" because of their "unfair" competition based on the strategy of releasing the source code to their products. That should be a fun "discussion".
Be careful of what you wish for - you jus
No good, Project has a dependency on MSO.dll (Score:5, Informative)
Project has huge dependencies on Office but not vice versa. Typically Project team picks up office bits around 90 days after Office stabilizes.
All of the common code is in MSO9.dll, or MSO10.dll, whatever, as well as "external" dependencies like MSXML.dll or MDAC from Web Data, or Trident (MSHTML). I'm not going to claim that you can't GPL Project without releasing the rest (don't know enough), but I can tell you the codebases are very intertwined. Does GPL still make sense given this info?
Basically all Project is is a specialized Access database application. (BTW, did you know that Exchange storage engine and Microsoft Access are both based on Jet? Exchange == Jet Blue. Access == Jet Red. And DHCP and Crypto DBs are stored in
If they went Open Source (Score:2, Insightful)
Forget Project, How about Open Source Windows (Score:5, Interesting)
--CTH
Lots of crappy windows distros? (Score:2, Funny)
Not quite the nutty suggestion it seems (Score:3, Insightful)
The real cash-cow for Microsoft is Office, and it is certainly inconceivable that Office could go Open Source.
However, there are certain MS products (IIS, even the core OS) which could be at least partially opened up in order to capture some of the coding-for-free Open Source culture. But if you thought that Linus was picky with patch acceptance, imagine what Bill would be like.
However, it won't happen, since:
More likely: (Score:4, Interesting)
A year ago people would have thought "M$" bought "Linux". But it still is a doable way and wouldn't be that late for them to do it.
Exercise in futility (Score:2)
There are plenty of other things to think about.
A question (Score:3, Informative)
I am not sure about how the closed-source software is checked for copyright infringement. Please enlighten us.
What if Microsoft Windows code has stuff stolen from other places. The closed source system that has so far protected it (if there are any stolen code at all) won't protect it anymore.
Of course they could simply delet those parts, but still just curious
Pardon my ignorance regarding closed-source source-code management. I do not mean to accuse Microsoft with stealing code. Just a scenario, since no one else sees the code, isn't it possible?
Thank you
GrimReality
2003-03-22 16:45:39 UTC (2003-03-22 11:45:39 EST)
Problems with the gub-mint. (Score:2, Insightful)
Should MS talk about releasing the kernel, there would be generals and politicians in an uproar, and would be screaming 'No, no! National Security!"
It would take a lot of explaining to convince them that malignant hackers couldn
Its not so impossible... (Score:5, Insightful)
Think about it, if the cost of the OS is gone one of the main reasons to swich to linux (not the biggest, but at least one of the more easily noted) is gone. If the source is open, will be no more security by obscurity, a lot of eyes will detect and fix the hundreds of remaining critical bugs in the code, maybe even make Win95 as stable as XP or Linux, or make really safe XP. If Windows now have almost the entire market share on the desktop and not so in the server market, with this not only expand even more their dominance in the desktop, but will have the same dominance in the the server market, and more than this, the market will expand with free/open windows.
What about Microsoft? How it will generate revenues? With services, support, not so free apps (i.e. Office), having their specific distribution, using it as a plataform of selling their own services (passport?).
3. Someone Will Fork It (Score:3, Funny)
Wheres the incentive to buy the boxed product? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Wheres the incentive to buy the boxed product? (Score:3, Insightful)
A sound argument, but I believe that, whether or not Office is OS doesn't matter that much, as the casual end user will simply download it anyways. Granted, downloading it NOW is illegal, but that doesn't stop a lot of people. I suppose that if it WAS legal, more people would, but how many more?
On the other hand, MS could keep a few modules proprietary, and the source wouldn't include the clipart and so on. So an OS version would perhaps have different features, or features which behave slightly diff
Visual Studio (Score:5, Informative)
-c
Re:Visual Studio (Score:5, Insightful)
Haha ah haha... Oh, wait ... that wasn't intentionally funny.
Personal preference of coding style does not define good vs. bad code. Quality is defined by consistent attention to detail, where those details are related to correctness, robustness, efficiency, security, etc.
In my years of coding, I've been mistaken in thinking there was ONE TRUE WAY in terms of coding style. I was wrong, and so are you. Style is only perpheral to other *important* qualities in software.
As much as I despise Microsoft (Score:5, Informative)
This would be a huge, monumental win for Free Software, because the most visual basis of almost all desktop computers in the world would be free software.
Will it happen? No.
Open Sores (Score:5, Funny)
Thought MS already had lots of open sores ?......
Two simple words-- (Score:4, Funny)
=)
Worried (Score:3, Interesting)
MS wouldn't open source their products. Instead, they'd do their own GNU/Linux distribution with some key changes. They'd integrate DRM into X along with some other "features" that make it more proprietary. Remember X is closable source (to coin a phrase) so they can indeed compromise one of the most important parts of Linux and make it their own. Remember, they don't want 10 instances of Office running on a single machine with 10 different users on X-terminals. X would clearly be the first thing they "fix". You'll get D3D or whatever they call their 3D API these days. Many stupid people will jump for joy because they can run their D3D games on Linux, meanwhile OpenGL would die off completely, leaving Linux with another proprietary standard that has no alternative. More things would happen, but I'll hold out for a job offer from them before I go on. This was just a very brief hint of a viable attack on their biggest competitor.
In the mean time, I suggest moving ASAP to completely free (as in GPLed freedom) software. Somone please coin a pleasing phrase for GPLed so people can hop on the bandwagon. For starters I'd like to see Mozilla ported to Fresco, along with GNome. Hell, merge GNome and KDE while doing it. If that's too complex, someone should do a GPL version of X, since the maintainers seem to be having issues lately (see recent
You asked, and now have been warned.
the article (Score:4, Interesting)
In the 3. Someone will fork it. section:
"If the boxed price is low enough, the fork is unlikely to clone the proprietary features."
This is not at all true. Geeks will clone something for the sole reason of that it is not Open Source. Even if their version is identical to the proprietary one. The proprietary version will then be labeled as "evil". Project would fork to GNUProject, nothing would ever get actively contributed to MS Project, and it would likely deviate to the point of incompatibility (of the programs and extensions, not the file formats). Microsoft would essentially be giving their product away free, not becoming involved in the Open Source community and development.
Does anyone have examples pertaining to this line of thinking?
Really hard to imagine. (Score:5, Insightful)
My BSD Conspiracy Theory (Score:3, Interesting)
And maybe replace some of the above-the-kernel bits too: replace IIS with Apache, etc. ISTR reading somewhere that Windows' TCP/IP stack is based in large part on BSD code already. Ballmer is on record saying that Apache is superior to IIS, and Apache's market share speaks for itself.
MS already support
They could then claim to be an "Open Source vendor", whatever that means. They'd become the largest *nix vendor (by license volume) overnight. If they passed the right compliance tests, they could even call it Unix, as IBM has done with OS/390 (I know, no-one takes that very seriously outside of IBM, but it's technically true.)
They'd need an equivalent of MS WoW to run existing Win32 software: that might explain their recent purchase of Connectix. Since Connectix already has a native version for the BSD-based MacOS X, porting would be pretty straightforward. Maybe they've tried this already on the quiet before agreeing to buy.
They could also quit banging their faces into the ground, trying to migrate Hotmail from BSD to WinXP.
Open Source derp de derp. (Score:3, Funny)
From the creators of GNUDer, and Tum Ta Microsoft Tum Ta Too, Rob Malda is Da Derp Open Source Derp Da Microsoft Derpee Derpee Dumb. Rated PG-13.
Re:if ms went open source (Score:2)
Watch for the first release of GNU/Windows here, people.
New York city if the U.S. loses: (Score:3, Funny)