
Ask HN: Do you think MS will ever open source Windows? - gigatexal
It would be the ultimate olive branch to the open source world and would fully commit them to a managed windows &#x2F; software as a service company I think. What they might gain is much faster codebase cleanup if they went this route and said: “Hey help is clean up our old win3.1 bloat and unneeded backwards compatibility or legacy code”. Or they could open source it in hopes to create some sort of windows Linux hybrid.
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nishnik
Think of it as a game of monopoly. Microsoft got lucky and bought the pink and
the orange street, got hotels over it. It was enjoying a good revenue. But
then few people(the open source community - chiefly Linus) bought the brown
street and the blue street, which aren't much costly. But it affected the
monopoly of Microsoft. So, Microsoft is breaking the hotels now. But still has
a lot of houses on its land. For Microsoft to loosen up, either we need some
big projects coming up(a substitute for Microsoft) - consider this the green
and the dark blue street. These projects, as their street names suggest, need
to be heavily ambitious. Or we need a bad phase for Microsoft. What I want to
say is, Microsoft won't be making Windows open source until it has Monopoly.

