Microsoft just cant stand the idea of being eliminated from an open source acquaintance company, and due to this, it has managed to pull some strides – evidently, since the days in of Steve Ballmer where he used to name Linux a cancer. However today, every person gives lip service to open source. It’s indeed difficulty to practice what you preach; but as we illustrate on our editorial on how to catch a glimpse of open-washing….
Microsoft has open-sourced diverse projects, including working with developers to carry out open source encoding languages on its operating systems and of late, it hired a senior executive of open source communities.
Michael Szul, an associate and developer at Barbella Digital say’s he used to be totally anti-Microsoft, he never had a Windows desktop. Today, according to Szul is considering acquiring Windows Phone 7 mobile phone to swap with his Android-based phone.
Szul alleges that although Microsoft dumped IronRuby and IronPython, it still has substantial support to the community. In fact, it has even maintained developer open to help the Mono team. Szul's complains as a developer are not as much of Microsoft's openness, and more of about how fractured its marketplace environment is among XBOX Live, MSN Marketplace Zune Marketplace, and many others.
Although having improved its footing in the developer community, it's still not in the same pace like other companies. Facebook, Apple, and Google form a few companies that command major open source contributions including popular projects such as the WebKit, Android and Apache Cassandra. So what has Microsoft built? –A cluster of open source ASP.NET code.
If Microsoft sees an endeavor from just having a great reputation of being a substantial player in the open source community, then it would push Microsoft further, not only to be seen as a player but to open-source something huge, and not late.
Looking at both sides of the coin what could Microsoft open-source that would have a huge enough impact?
Windows:
Of course this would be huge; however it will more or less certainly never take off. In fact, it's extremely huge as a source of revenue for Microsoft to risk cannibalize its sales – and allow other strong companies to package rival distributions. Another factor is that of all the proprietary elements licensed from other firms.
Conceivably, Microsoft could take some kind of an open core approach, still. And maybe some of those licensed elements could even provide for as the differentiators among the open source and proprietary editions of Windows. But even such a scenario, things seems unlikely.
Windows Phone:
This is also uncertain. Bearing in mind the amount of money Microsoft washed-out getting Nokia just to run Windows on its handsets, the company almost certainly isn't about to give it away at no cost, not even open-source it. Microsoft has made even less possible by the reality that the Windows phone, desktop and the tablet OS are likely to fuse into Windows 8.
Internet Explorer:
This brings logic, apart from working with separating OS components from the browser, as well as dealing with approved technology. The other large browsers -Chrome, Firefox and Safari - are either based on open source software or open source, and Microsoft grants IE away in any case – But would it make any variation whatsoever at this juncture if IE was open source?
ServiceOS:
Do you remember some time back in 2009 when Microsoft Research project was called Gazelle? As of now, it’s still vaporware; even though there's a strong case to open-sourcing it. Google Chrome Operating System is already showing considerable numbers of trickling into the marketplace, considering some other small fry browser-oriented OSs. Open-sourcing Internet Explorer well with this small OS would give Microsoft something it could bargain to netbook manufacturers as an option to Chrome. In the meantime, it would be adjusted particularly towards services such as Office 365 and Bing.
Now, would an open source ServiceOS bring any distinction at this point? It’s still uncertain. The company perhaps won’t see the need to open-source it either, taking into account that it was already able have vendors install Windows as a substitute of Linux on netbooks once. Considering the growing perception that tablets are the future; Microsoft already announced tablet approach in Windows 8.
This leaves us with Office, which I don’t see it happening!
What else remains? Possibly some components of Azure maybe open sourced? The Kinect SDK? The other key substitute we are likely to see is that Microsoft may create something totally new and open-source it.
More at OpenSourceBox.......
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