Microsoft doesn't want Longhorn reloaded

In unsurprising news, Microsoft has finally put a stop to the "Longhorn Reloaded" project, an effort to continue development of an early version of Windows "Longhorn," the precursor of Windows Vista.

The programmers wanted to keep working with an early version of Longhorn, which still had features, such as WinFS, that were later cut. Of course, despite some moves to get along with the open source world, Microsoft hasn't exactly decided to make its crown jewel (even test versions of it) free for the world to modify.

Nonetheless, the group behind Longhorn Reloaded expressed dismay at Redmond's move, saying in a recent posting that it had received a cease and decist letter from Microsoft.

"It deeply saddens me that although Microsoft have known about this project for many months they only issued us with this notice a few days after we started to distribute the iso via torrents and ftp server," the project's senior administrator said in the posting, adding that any links to the code or requests for a download link posted on the site would be deleted.

Mary Jo Foley noted the project's demise in a recent posting on her ZDNet blog.

[qwerty75]

why?

What a waste of development time.<br /><br />There is nothing in Longhorn or Vista worth anything.<br /><br />If you want to put that kind of effort towards something, why not an OSS operating system? They won't stab you in the back and you will be actually working with quality software.

[Penguinisto]

While I agree...

The answer is rather simple: There might have been some actual innovation in WinFS. <br /><br />Personally, if you want to advance and innovate, an open-source OS is the only way to go w/o fear of angry companies who don't like to be shown-up on their own products. <br /><br />That said, there is something to Windows that makes Joe Sixpack feel warm and cozy inside (familiarity, mostly), and one cannot blame the occasional programmer for wanting to ease folks away from the MSFT portion of it while retaining that very same thing that makes the average user remain feeling cozy.<br /><br />/P

[weegg]

Illustration of MS corporate strategy

Afraid independent developers would get winfs working because <br />they aren't as concerned with backward compatibility as Redmond.<br /><br />Anyway, its a mute point with zfs coming on to the scene which <br />blows out winfs and all present day formats.

[qwerty75]

Backward Compatibility

It is a shame MS refuses to ditch legacy code. Maybe Vista wouldn't have been quite a mess.<br /><br />The amusing thing is that one of the few people there with a clue wrote one of the best software security books(Writing Secure Code, it is getting long in the tooth though) on the market and is published by MS press. MS totally ignores the ideas in the book, including ditching backward compatibility. <br /><br />It is so ironic that MS could produce such a solid security book and then not take advantage of it at all. I can't believe that the author Michael Howard is such a company man and sticks around despite the fact that he is almost totally ignored by his employer.

[ethana2]

Yes.

File system ownage, microsoft. How many FS's does windows even support? Three? I got...<br /><br />NTFS<br />FAT<br />ReiserFS<br />soon will have ZFS<br />ext2 and ext3<br />...and I think a few other ones I'm not remembering.<br /><br />You know what, Redmond? I DARE you to make WinFS an open specification like silverlight. Not that people really do dares anymore...