Posted on 04/02/2015 2:41:35 PM PDT by dayglored
Could Microsoft's open source advocacy ever result in the company offering its cash cow Windows OS up to open source? It's possible, according to one Microsoft official, though his comments Wednesday should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt.
During a technology panel session in Silicon Valley, Microsoft's Mark Russinovich, CTO for the company's Azure cloud platform, did what Microsoft officials have been prone to doing in recent years: Preach Microsoft's conversion from open source skeptic to proponent. Open source, Russinovich said at the Chef Conf 2015 conference, was "no longer taboo" at the commercial software giant, pointing to Microsoft's accommodations for open source, such as having Linux account for roughly 20 percent of virtual machines deployed on Azure.
The company also recently open-sourced its .Net CoreCLR, as opting for open source can entice developers to use Microsoft technologies, Russinovich explained. "For something like .Net, we believe that that is an enabling technology that really can get people started on other Microsoft solutions."
Panel moderator Cade Metz, business editor at Wired, asked Russinovich if Windows itself might eventually be made open source, which elicited loud applause from the audience. "It's definitely possible," Russinovich responded. "Like I said, it's a new Microsoft." The company is having every conversation that could be imagined about what to do with its software and services, he said.
...
(Excerpt) Read more at infoworld.com ...
Windows 3.1 maybe
You got that right. Those utilities are great.
I just finished porting PolarSSL...er “mbed TLS” (an open source crypto library for embedded systems) to Windows 3.1....it wasn’t that bad, considering the G_d-awful x86 memory segmentation model...the only thing I’m worried about is the RSA code—SS ==== DS, and it’s a shared library, so SS != DS!
Almost 20 years ago, there was an experimental IPv6 stack driver for NT4. It was released as an open-source driver by their R&D division, since they were at peak monopoly then...(coughcoughinternetexplorer4coughcough)
The documentation is still there if you look deep enough, but the code may well be long gone...
For Windows 2000/XP, the IPv6 stack became mature enough (and feature-complete by 2000, but only provisionally approved for production environments in 2001, fully so in 2006)—they just took it private...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.