[nekopa]

I have always wondered what would happen if Bill Gates would turn around one day and say 'fuck it, I'm going to open source the whole kit and kaboodle.'

What would it be like? Would people brave trying to fix all the problems in the windows kernel? I wonder what XP source code looks like. How many people would try to fork MS Office? Bt most interesting would be what would happen to the business landscape if all MS products were free. Would Apple die or become larger? Would malware go through the roof, or be extinguished? What would large corporate license holders do with the savings? (would there even be that many savings in comparison to TCO?)

[oelmekki]

> Bt most interesting would be what would happen to the business landscape if all MS products were free.

I'm under the impression it's already part of their strategy, and it's probably a cause why most people still use windows. They know they can easily download softwares on torrent websites, and MS is pretty much tolerant about it (as far as it's about individuals, not businesses).

[johnchristopher]

You are mistaking Adobe for MS. MS is going down hard on pirates reselling their stuff to individuals or making it available online.

Also you seem to imply MS let every software be torrented intentionnaly. But MS doesn't publish every software in the world and they aren't responsible, nor should they fight, for other software makers's piracy problems.

It's certainly not part of their strategy. More like a pirate post-fact rationalisation line of thinking.

[nivla]

> You are mistaking Adobe for MS. It's certainly not part of their strategy.

Nope, they are following the same brilliant strategy as Adobe.

"Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though," Gates told an audience at the University of Washington. "And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade." [1]

[1] http://articles.latimes.com/2006/apr/09/business/fi-micropir...

[johnchristopher]

Damn, you are right. I remember reading that quote years ago. To be fair he specifically deals with Chinese and asian markets though. Not sure this applies to the US and european markets.

[Zigurd]

The .NET framework library source code is available. If you are a national government or very important partner, you can take a look at what is supposed to be much of the Windows source code, but you can't build and run it.

Microsoft derives a lot of income from enterprise licensing and support, so it's not obvious just how much income Microsoft could lose by going open source.

Windows CE had to be abandoned for mobile devices because it had fallen behind Linux-based mobile device OSs. They probably continue to believe Windows is superior to Linux, so they, internally anyway, have a "secret sauce" argument against open source for that.

Perhaps they will have to go truly open source to regain trust after the Prism scandal.