full-disclosure - Re: Why Microsoft should make windows open source

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Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2007 14:31:50 -0400
From: Valdis.Kletnieks@...edu
To: Morning Wood <se_cur_ity@...mail.com>
Cc: full-disclosure@...ts.grok.org.uk
Subject: Re: Why Microsoft should make windows open source

On Wed, 04 Apr 2007 10:57:49 PDT, Morning Wood said:
> ..what we need is another Linus Torvalds to build and release a "newcode" 
> win32 compliant
> kernel / base that uses....

Ask the Samba team how easy it is to write MS-compliant code without
access to the original or hitting against patent issues....

The only reason that Linus got anyplace is because none of the entities that
owned the intellectual property involved in the concept of "writing a POSIX-y
Unix-y operating system" had any desire to stop others from doing so (at least,
not after the Berkely-ATT lawsuit regarding BSD).  You wanted to spend your
time writing a new system that implemented the functions in the Unix
documentation, that was OK by ATT (and its successors in interest) as long as
your code didn't include any ATT source.  Microsoft won't give you that option
unless you get a court order forcing them to do it (literally).

Also, it will take a special flavor of person to want to go through the effort
of recreating the estimated 25M or 30M lines of code in WinXP - and avoid the
temptation to "fix" things along the way.  There's a *lot* of truly blecherous
API's in there, kept around specifically for backward-combatability.

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