Microsoft may one day open source Windows
Mark Russinovich, a Microsoft technical fellow and senior engineer, and well-known for his Sysinternals/Winternals products, dropped a bombshell in front of several hundred people during a panel discussion at the ChefCon DevOps conference in the United States. Russinovich told the crowd it was "definitely possible" that Microsoft could, in the future, choose to open up the Windows source code. "It's a new Microsoft," he said. "Every conversation you can imagine about what should we do with our software -- open versus not-open versus services -- has happened," he said. Almost 20 percent of the the company's Azure cloud computing virtual machines run Linux already.
The prospect is not as surprising as it might once have been. Last November, the company announced plans to open source the full server-side .NET core stack and bring the open-sourced .NET core to Linux and Mac OS X - with everything happening in plain view on code repository GitHub. The company now has more than 1000 software repositories on GitHub, but until now Windows, a US$4 billion per-quarter cash cow, has looked untouchable.
The prospect is not as surprising as it might once have been. Last November, the company announced plans to open source the full server-side .NET core stack and bring the open-sourced .NET core to Linux and Mac OS X - with everything happening in plain view on code repository GitHub. The company now has more than 1000 software repositories on GitHub, but until now Windows, a US$4 billion per-quarter cash cow, has looked untouchable.
Sales Guy:
Inexpensive alternatives like Chrome OS are eating into our Windows revenue! What if we give away the OS and charge everyone a yearly maintenance fee?
Tech Guy:
Are you sure the customers would stand for paying for bug fixes every year, forever?
Sales Guy:
Why not? It's brilliant! They only look at the purchase price of the laptop in the store. They won't even realize that they'll end up paying us significantly more than they are now!
Tech Guy:
But what if they want to cancel their subscription?
Sales Guy:
Cover their screens in Windows Genuine Advantage ads and force their computer to reboot after a few minutes; like we do with pirated copies now!
Tech Guy:
Won't that just push them further towards Linux-based alternatives?
Sales Guy:
Oh ya, that reminds me. You and 18,000 of your buddies report to this room down the hall. Sorry.