[chillingeffect]

> It's admirable that MS is responding to criticism of their device and working for a solution.

It is, but it isn't some trade secret, they could open source this and have 1,000s of people converging toward the solution. Why are they so hung up and being The Ones Who Deliver The Software And The Hardware?

[virtue3]

money? "optimal experience"

I'm all for supporting open source. But seriously, it took me about 20-30 hours to get my FreeNAS setup working (the way I wanted) (getting the hardware together, configuring... lots and lots of configuring). And I'm definitely not going to say that that project is "end user friendly".

I really really love open source projects but I'm willing to put down that they don't always meet the end user in an appreciable way without a serious and committed company behind the product making it end user applicable (android, et all). Otherwise the open source project will fit the needs of the people that work on it (engineers) and that's about it.

[icebraining]

Pretty sure chillingeffect's idea is to have Microsoft behind it, so I'm not sure how that applies.

[virtue3]

Sorry, I didn't really understand the parents as that. I guess a more on topic reason might be:

They can barely manage a team of their own engineers to get this product out. Throwing more guys at it isn't going to help necessarily. Not without significantly more overhead and more managers. I think mystical man month definitely still applies to open source projects as well.

that and microsoft is just not good at managing open source. And I can't imagine anyone would want to work on the windows kernel without being paid to do so >_>

[mpyne]

> Why are they so hung up and being The Ones Who Deliver The Software And The Hardware?

For the same reason that Ubuntu and Firefox are?

[icebraining]

Firefox isn't delivering the hardware. And the software is open source.