Full Disclosure mailing list archives
Re: Why Microsoft should make windows open source
From: Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu
Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2007 14:31:50 -0400
On Wed, 04 Apr 2007 10:57:49 PDT, Morning Wood said:
..what we need is another Linus Torvalds to build and release a "newcode" win32 compliant kernel / base that uses....
Ask the Samba team how easy it is to write MS-compliant code without access to the original or hitting against patent issues.... The only reason that Linus got anyplace is because none of the entities that owned the intellectual property involved in the concept of "writing a POSIX-y Unix-y operating system" had any desire to stop others from doing so (at least, not after the Berkely-ATT lawsuit regarding BSD). You wanted to spend your time writing a new system that implemented the functions in the Unix documentation, that was OK by ATT (and its successors in interest) as long as your code didn't include any ATT source. Microsoft won't give you that option unless you get a court order forcing them to do it (literally). Also, it will take a special flavor of person to want to go through the effort of recreating the estimated 25M or 30M lines of code in WinXP - and avoid the temptation to "fix" things along the way. There's a *lot* of truly blecherous API's in there, kept around specifically for backward-combatability.
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Current thread:
- Why Microsoft should make windows open source James Matthews (Apr 02)
- Re: Why Microsoft should make windows open source Troy Cregger (Apr 04)
- Re: Why Microsoft should make windows open source Simon Smith (Apr 04)
- Re: Why Microsoft should make windows open source Morning Wood (Apr 04)
- Re: Why Microsoft should make windows open source Valdis . Kletnieks (Apr 04)
- Re: Why Microsoft should make windows open source Troy Cregger (Apr 04)
- Re: Why Microsoft should make windows open source Troy Cregger (Apr 04)
- Re: Why Microsoft should make windows open source Valdis . Kletnieks (Apr 04)
- Re: Why Microsoft should make windows open source Vincent Archer (Apr 10)
- Re: Why Microsoft should make windows open source Simon Smith (Apr 04)
- Re: Why Microsoft should make windows open source Troy Cregger (Apr 04)