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.

A new report out of Canada suggests that high numbers of students at Canadian universities involves the acceptance of too many "marginally talented" students. University of Saskatchewan researcher, Ken Coates, has proposed reducing Canadian university student populations by 30% -- to be complemented by an increased emphasis on job training programs at technical colleges -- to improve the education and employment outcomes of all student cohorts.

A Council of Ontario Universities report from 2014, entitled University Works, provides a counter-argument to this narrative, however. According to a summary article, the earlier report claims that "over 40 years, a university graduate earns an average $915,840 more than a college graduate and $1.4 million more than a high school graduate" reinforcing the long-standing idea of the greater return on investment supplied by a general university degree.