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<g>
I think Open Source has it's pros and cons.
By opening the source there is effectively over a million debuggers working on the code. One would hope that this would result in faster, more stable code. It would also allow third parties to develop applications and drivers in a more informed manner, since they know what is going on inside the OS.
On the other hand, coordination of such a large body of code would be a nightmare, and what profit motivated company would want to do it? Would third party vendors be as willing to work with an open source scheme? Would Microsoft itself invest less time in the development of the OS, since (a) they may feel eveeryone else can now do the work for them, and (b) they would be unwilling to use proprietry techniques within the code, meaning we get the OS they are willing to show us, not the best OS that they can produce
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- Lots of developer hours would be wasted reading incomprehensible windows source rather than writing apps.
- We would quickly return to the bad old DOS days where everyone's apps used undocumented unsupported APIs and consequently interfered with one another and broke with each new release of the OS.
- Similar to above, with a proliferation of patches, and in the absence of a strong central coordinating authority, apps would start relying on new features in non-standard patched kernels making standardized distributions a nightmare.
- Microsoft puts an awful lot of time and effort into documenting their APIs. I have not seen this quality of documentation in any open-source product. Period. I can get a lot more done with MSDN and PSDK telling me how things work than I could if I had to read the source to figure things out. Programmers are often not great at documenting their work and I know of no open-source project that features great technical writing in its documentation. If Windows were to go open-source, I would fear most that we would lose the commitment to maintaining Microsoft's standard of excellence in documentation.
All of these fears can be addressed, but could only be addressed realistically if MS were committed to supporting open-source development of Windows. Without such a commitment, even if Judge Jackson ordered MS to release the Windows source, there would be little benefit for developers
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I agree with Chris and Johnathan's points. However I am even more polar on this point. I absolutely do NOT want to see open source Windows. In my opinion, that would be a perfect example of the goverment screwing up something it does not understand.
I like open source but I do not consider it the panacea that others seem to. For all the hype of Mozilla, when is it actually going to be _done_? Everyone keeps rhapshodizing about how great it is, and yet months keep going by without a finished product.
Since Netscape has gone open source, MS has released IE5.0 then IE 5.01. If IE6 doesn't beat Mozilla to the market, it will follow soon after. And if past performance is an indicator, it will lap Mozilla in terms of both quality and standards conformance.
The strong central authority that MS exercises over their "standards" is in my mind the very source of their quality. The Microsoft Development platform (specifically the MSDN program) is simply superb, second to none. There's nothing like it anywhere else. You'll never get such coherence from a committee, or a group of companies much less an open source OS. Look at how Linux is already starting to fragment as the various vendors try to make a buck off of it.
While I like the fact that open source exists, I sincerely hope we never see open source Windows.
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I think Open Source was quite a great idea 10 years ago.
In the mean time you have much more powerful and efficient tools to extend an application. Just think of COM and Corba.
Why should I spend my time browsing code formatted in a non familiar way for an entry-point to insert my functionality ?
Moreover, usually an entry-point consists of several places scattered along kilobytes of source code and the code is also the only documentation you have.
And if one claims that he wants to see how good programs are written, I think he will find a lot of free and well written documentation and examples on MSDN or CodeProject or CodeGuru
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We NEED Open Source! What we DON'T need, are the extremes.
We need Open Source for the several reasons why the Justice Department got involved in the first place: Power concentrated in one place is dangerous, primarily because it caters only to the needs of those holding the power (and we all know what power does to people). Besides, we also know that those holding power, become very reluctant to relinguishing it (once they have it), and that's where corruptions (however innocent looking it may appear at first) begin to replace virtues (like 'common good') with 'self interest'. Inherently, it places restriction on creative freedom, meaning, anything resembling growth alien to the views of the dictator, are supressed. But "anything" cannot be assimilated into the mainstream, because "anything" also include the extremes which would also be dangerous. That's where the NEED for "controlled openess" in the form of qualified committees must be introduced.
Computer languages and other disciplines are placed in the care of committees. Isn't the ISO and ANSI, organizations made up of committees? I don't see bedlam occurring from their activities
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Whilst the documentation in MSDN is very good, some of the samples leave a lot to be desired. Take the example of how to write an exchange message store. It is written in C, but tries to emulate C++ and is virtually impossible to understand as a result. How many people have tried to use samples like this, and spent time rejigging them until they have a sensible design that works?
A set of examples written in a language most appropriate to the solution would IMHO be more useful than making Windows open source
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I fully agree with Chris that free software has it's advantages. What I would like MS to do is develop a linuxconfig like software that can allow you to modify every single aspect of the OS the kernel and what not and then recompile the kernel for smaller and optimized kernel instaed of the unnecessay SCSI and USB drivers (in my case). If MS develops such a software that allows it to modify the core of the OS then that alone will silence many critics as I sincerely doubt that many people will modify the linux kernel code directly. I have been with Linux since slackware and all i find people who speak of adv of opensource is use linuxconfig.
Also a SUN kinda opensource where the s/w owner can modify the code for his own purposes can be permitted if deemed necessay.
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