| Article author here again: Quick point: I never said it was likely -- my feeling is MSFT will take the typical "innovators dilemma" track to irrelevance and disruption because of the lack of agility and ability to make this type of big move. But as for practicality another quick point: just becuase it is open source doesn't mean MSFT can't use a custom license that avoids 90% of these objections. It could be strict GPL and really nobody would want to fork that damned thing so it would likely not splinter much and with the awesome developer community of Windows devs that could be immediately brought "in the inner circle" of code, I think the Open Windows FOSS community could be second to none. And so you could see huge amount of security patches and other bugfixes being corralled into the codebase which would improve quality and big banks etc. could fix their own bugs or build custom features at will. A standards body could even give a huge degree of assurance to Enterprise IT that MSFT wont consumerize or unilaterally change license terms from year to next, thus reducing risk. Those that doubt open source business models should realize that Google and Amazon AWS are massively open source (and without that "give it away" attitude of their core offering would be nowhere) and derive huge benefit from the contributions of the FOSS community. This is real bottom line value folks. |