Both the WSJ and Cnet have blog posts in favour of opening up Windows. The basic argument:
Why can’t Windows be proprietary, for-profit and copy-protected — while at the same time be open for user control and inspection?
The software’s “black boxness” was driven home for me once when XP was taking an excruciatingly long time to load, and even the best tech sleuths at Microsoft couldn’t figure out the cause. Had I been able to look under cover, I might have seen, oh, that Windows was wasting 90 seconds looking for a nonexistent drive.
The ZDNet post is more ground to earth and gives some pretty good insight into why it’s never going to happen.
- “History has shown you can’t be a little bit open source. You’re either in or you’re not.”
- Open Source would mean a compete change of business model
- “Not everyone will pay, in any way. [...] Try explaining that to the investment bankers.”
- “If they opened the code to inspection [...] the laughter wouldn’t stop for six months.”
- “[Can] you imagine how many lawyers will be crawling over that code base looking for open source snippets to sue over?”
Wall Street Journal & CNet & ZDNet
Tags: windows