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.
Still they sell a lot of Window licenses.
Open sourcing does not mean to give away for free. It means anyone who bought Windows is able to look at the source and do modifications for himself. It is all about licensing. "Open source" and "free" are not symonyms. Some open source licenses means free, other not. Spreading the source to people not having a bought license would still be pirating, if they want it to be so.
MS is at this point in desperate need to get developers. This is visible from their latest moves. Anything that might attract developers to develop for Windows is welcome inside of the new MS. It is thus not impossible they will open source Windows in the future unless they have too much licenced code as an obstacle in this process.