Microsoft has revealed they are willing to make Windows open source.
This came from no less than Microsoft Technical Fellow Mark Russonovich, and he means it. Microsoft has in fact opened up many parts of Windows’ code by making them open source, such as .NET.
Open source to most folks would simply mean making the operating system free, but it’s actually more than that. It means that the source code will be available to any developer to tinker with, giving everyone an opportunity to make changes to the code. This is precisely how Android is set up, and why it has gone so far in the past few years.
Linux has found use in business, so much so that it runs most of the open web. Microsoft has even been compelled to open up its Azure servers to Linux, and now 20 % of those servers run open source.
While Mark expressed Microsoft’s openness to the idea, it won’t happen just quite yet, as it would require a fundamental shift in business model. It certainly won’t be tenable for Windows 10’s release, but who knows? Its successor might go open source soon enough.
