osOpinion: The Obligatory Microsoft Article

[ Thanks to Kelly
McNeill for this link. ]

“And yes, if Microsoft was purely interested in profitmaking, a
spun-off applications group would have an incentive to port Office
to Linux and other alternative systems. But if Microsoft was purely
interested in profitmaking, it would have done this already. And it
isn’t just that Microsoft is working on Windows alone as a matter
of policy – everyone arguing this seems to forget the port of
Office to the Macintosh. Microsoft – even a factionalised
Microsoft, and even a divided Microsoft – feeds the cash cow.”

“Another option available to Jackson is to force Microsoft to
open up the source code or APIs to Windows. I can’t see this as
being anything more than a token gesture – it’s not immediately
clear to me how dumping several million lines of extremely buggy
and kludgy C code into the world would fix predatory
behaviour.”

“Sure, it would be nice to have a copy of the Windows code to
have a laugh at, but I don’t see anyone doing anything useful with
it; we already have a glut of Open Source window managers – after
all, what is Windows but an overweight window manager in search of
a kernel? – and it’s way too big and heavy for most developers to
deal with. I guess we could tighten up the security, maybe, and fix
up incompatibilities with the APIs, but then people who even
slightly care about security and compatibility don’t run Windows
anyway….”

“Instead, I believe I have a solution so brilliant, so
simple and so effective it’s a surprise nobody else has thought of
it yet: put RMS in charge.“

Complete
Story