Matt Mullenweg made the prediction. I’m not all that good with specific dates, but it sounds somewhat reasonable. There are many reasons for me to agree on this. Here are some:
- Neither Microsoft in general, no Bill Gates are stupid. They are very much profit oriented. Whatever makes them more money, they’ll go for it.
- Windows is not the only source of income for Microsoft – they make plenty of other software (office applications and games for example), hardware (game console anyone?), and services (web in particular).
- Every new version of Windows increases Microsoft’s costs with backward compatibility, testing, troubleshooting, etc by a lot. These things can be easily outsourced to the community. Money saving.
- There is plenty of third-party software in Windows. Pushing the system open source is a good chance of brushing it up and doing some refactoring. As Matt said in one of the comments to his own post “If Sun can do it with Java, Microsoft can do it with Windows.”. Agreed.
- Operating system per se becomes more of a commodity thing. OS wars are in the past. Of course, OS is an important part of software industry, but for more and more end users, the browser is the operating system.
- The mobile industry is growing as fast as ever, with the whole variety of new devices, applications, trends and ideas. That’s a huge money pie, where open sourcing again makes a lot of sense.
- Google is hiring all the good people and allows them to work on their projects for 20% of their time. With Windows being closed source, there is no way for Microsoft to exploit that resource. :)
These are just a few. The more I think about it, the more it makes sense.
What do you think?
Hi, I found your site through ngtech.gr, seems like you’ve got a nice blog here.
I personally don’t think Microsoft will open source Windows any time. I have also used Linux for some years now, but I think open source goes against Microsoft’s whole business model (i.e. Embrace and Destroy) Microsoft is all about being *the choice*, not about making more choice.
I think open-sourcing Windows is the best thing that could happen to it, but I also don’t think that it will happen.
Anyway, nice meeting you, keep in touch,
David
http://thebigbyte.blogspot.com
http://davids-pics.blogspot.com
David,
first of all hi and welcome to here ;)
As I said, I believe that Microsoft is driven my profits, not by philosophies. Those things that worked for them before still work. But I think they won’t drive as much money into their pockets as other philosophies. With time this gets more and more obvious, and I don’t think Microsoft is silly enough not to notice. :)
But the time will tell….