Microsoft: An Open Source Windows Is ‘Definitely Possible’ | WIRED
One day, Microsoft could “open source” the code that underpins the OS—giving it away for free. So says Mark Russinovich, one of the company’s top engineers.
"It's definitely possible," Russinovich says. "It's a new Microsoft."
It could make sense. Given that Microsoft HAS been acting more like a nimble and aggressive company recently, as opposed to their giant slow moving behemoth ways of the very recent past, it might be possible. The fact that this would even be discussed shows a huge change in the company. In 2001 Ballmer referred to the free software Linux kernel as a "cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches". Windows, along with Office, have been the crown jewels of Microsoft so to discuss opening it up to others indicates a shift in the company for sure.
Interesting. Id say unlikely at the moment, Microsoft is pretty huge still with many aspects still backwards. They are better, but got some way to go too.
Even a little bit more open here and there would help though.
At the moment, I just want/hope/prey that their Hololens hardware and associated AR protocols in Windows10 are separated and open enough for anyone to make hardware. "pulling an Apple" and restricting it to their own devices would really hurt any emerging market – and their chances to be a dominate OS in it.
Agreed. They've opened a lot of .NET which was smart IMO. I think their Hololens looks pretty exciting (we'll see when it gets here though) and agree about them not making it uber proprietary, though in that respect that seems to be the trend in the industry lately.
Indeed. My "dream" scanario would be for Windows 10 to let anyone make AR hardware for it, and have drivers that abstract associated thing.
For example, make mouse pointer events have a z, so you can have different hardware solutions for working in 3 dimensions (selecting,dragging etc) without every coder needing to write specific code for each one.
I suspect also even if Hololens gets a good reception, it will be beaten by other options the following year, maybe 2. It would be nice if, say, whenever google finnishing their MagicLeap tech it could also plug into a Windows10 machine and use all its apps.
As I said, dream.