
Ask HN: What will happen when Windows is open sourced? - anticensor
As we know, Microsoft recently opensourced MS-DOS under MIT. I expect them to opensource Windows soon. Windows will get more than 300 thousands of developers for free by open-sourcing the current version.
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jerengie
Well, DOS is very old and incomparable to modern systems in regard of comfort
and program availability. Therefore Microsoft has little value from it. On the
other hand, Windows has lots of value. Because even when most private
customers get recent versions as free upgrades, the corporate site looks very
different. Just think about different server versions of Windows, which most
possibly share huge parts with the Windows 10 kernel. They cost real money +
user access licenses. Therefore - although I hope you are right - I don't
believe that Windows will get open sourced anytime soon. I like the idea very
much, but I'm trying to be realistic about this.

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anticensor
Is there any info on how much revenue is extracted per software item? Windows
is most widely used one, but I am sure it is not one that extracts money the
most.

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CyberFonic
MSDOS v2.0 is about 52,000 lines of assembler code.

Windows is in the order of 40,000,000 lines of mostly C++ code.

It is very unlikely that MS would release intellectual property that is approx
3000 times the size and possibly a several million times the value of MSDOS.

Even assuming that they did, it will take developers a long time to come up to
speed with understanding the code base sufficiently to make useful changes. In
the meantime MS won't be standing still.

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anticensor
There are ReactOS developers who do understand Windows. They would be happy
with increased user base and community support.

