WSJ to Microsoft: You need to open source Windows
Many of us have been saying for a long time that Microsoft's Windows product would be better if the company open sourced it. But today marks the first day that the Wall Street Journal has chimed in to second the motion:
Open-source software such as Linux is traditionally seen as the opposite of proprietary software from the likes of Microsoft and Apple. But that's a false dichotomy. Why can't Windows be proprietary, for-profit and copy-protected -- while at the same time be open for user control and inspection? If Windows were a car, you'd never be able to open the hood and see what was underneath.
The software's "black boxness" was driven home for me once when XP was taking an excruciatingly long time to load, and even the best tech sleuths at Microsoft couldn't figure out the cause. Had I been able to look under cover, I might have seen, oh, that Windows was wasting 90 seconds looking for a nonexistent drive.
Lee Gomes, who wrote the article, also suggested a few other ways in which Microsoft could improve Windows (Fewer SKUs, snapshots and rollbacks, etc.), but this is the one that would have the biggest impact on end-users and Microsoft partners.
Lee is right: Open source wouldn't spell the end of Microsoft's proprietary business model, per se. Rather, it would give Microsoft's ecosystem more control of its fate after it has paid for the software.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
In Win2003, Vista, Win2008 you can get previous versions of any directory and any file, which are frozen regularly, depending on how configured. This is called volume shadow copy. By the way, why this P.O.S Jive forum software is so bad? Is it because it's Java or it's because it's open source?
- by gplpedia June 6, 2008 2:02 PM PDT
- Well, I think this will happen ONLY after MS runs out of ideas or features to add on to Windows. At the present situation making Windows Open Source I think will jeoparadize MS --- www.gplpedia.com
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