
Free Software Foundations effort to make Windows 7 open source - rakibtg
https://www.fsf.org/windows/upcycle-windows-7
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kstenerud
Campaigns like these shake my confidence in the FSF as a serious organization
because it shows how little they understand about large, private software
projects.

Open sourcing large proprietary software products like this involves:

\- Licensing agreements with potentially thousands of third parties (Adobe,
Apple, Xerox, IBM, SCO, Oracle to name a few)

\- Trade secrets (also thousands, involving third parties)

\- Distribution restrictions

\- Export controls

Tracking down all involved parties is hard enough. Getting them all to agree
is even harder, and more often than not is impossible. I suspect that even if
all of the brass at Microsoft were keen on open sourcing Windows 7, it still
couldn't be done.

