[raxxorrax]

I don't know if I buy this explanation to be honest. I guess main business is office because nearly every company on the planet uses it (for no good reason in that vast majority of cases, and please don't be the guy that defends 'cloud-like' auto-save).

Azure? Not too much touching yet, I am an AWS guy (I can complain here just as much). But their office software and worse their office software APIs are abysmal. I am not registering an app and describe its function to access their beta graph API just to add a task to Planner. I fired the customer that wanted that.

Desktop does make money since most people use their office suite on a Windows PC. Windows isn't that important anymore, but it is still present. And the direction they go with TPM and notebook camera requirements is predictably bad.

You cannot open-source Windows anymore, that would probably be a legal nightmare. Maybe parts of it of course.

[coldacid]

Some newer parts of Windows are open source, and in other places they've added open source software to the overall distribution (such as OpenSSH). But yeah, almost nothing legacy in Windows has been or will be open sourced, due to the difficulty of tracing which lines Microsoft actually owns and which ones they only have a license to.

For legacy components that have been open sourced, the only one I can think of is conhost, which they're trying to get rid of anyway in favour of the new (and fully open-source) Windows Terminal and its console component OpenConsole.

[DHowett]

For what it’s worth, OpenConsole is conhost, and any improvements we make there go right back into Windows. We’ll probably[1] never get rid of conhost; the worst we’ll do is make it possible to update it without updating Windows so that folks don’t have to wait so long to get bug fixes.

[1]: so long as I am the engineering lead. You know how these big companies are :|

(edit to add: This isn’t meant to detract from your point, just to add additional info.)

[coldacid]

I could have sworn that OpenConsole is a complete rewrite of conhost. Having double-checked the terminal project's readme, though, I see that I was mistaken in this belief.

[vetinari]

Do you have any plan for Terminal to be able to be the default console in Windows 10, just like it can in Windows 11?