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Is Microsoft heading on open source ? 1

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victorashi

IS-IT--Management
Jul 22, 2006
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I have seen some videos from the Microsoft guys , who teach us how to change certain things in the Vista OS through Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 ??!! .... they say : it`s as simple as that .....
 
Where are these videos? What are they telling you how to change?

I doubt that microsoft has any interest in making anything open source, they probably just realize that people who use Visual Studio might not be very fond of some of the 'features' included in Vista.

Ignorance of certain subjects is a great part of wisdom
 
Even if Mi[¢]ro$oft is telling someone how to tweak settings through Visual Studio, that is not any kind of open-source.

Open-source products are ones which the publisher provides to the user, free of charge, the entire source-code of the product. The user, depending on the license, may or may not have rights to modify or redistribute the code, but publication of source-code is a necessary part of being open-source. Despite their having provided parts of the source code of some products, Mi[¢]ro$oft's publishing methodologies are not open-source at all.

Open-specification products are ones which the entire product, all of its API calls, are documented and that documentation made available to the user. Mi[¢]ro$oft's publication methodologies fail this, too, as the company is notorious for having hooks into the Win32 API that only they know about. While Mi[¢]ro$oft is getting better on the open-spec front, it is not there yet.

So Mi[¢]ro$oft publishes closed-source, mostly-closed-spec software.


Want the best answers? Ask the best questions! TANSTAAFL!
 
It does look like Microsoft is looking to incorporate more open source code into their proprietary systems. Additionally, it simply makes sense from a development perspective to leverage what other people have done. This is something Microsoft has always excelled at. Bill Gates and the word Innovation are pretty much oxymorons.

I don't believe Microsoft will go 'opensource' unless forced by the EU (it will never happen in the US courts). It doesn't make sense financially. I do believe however that they will continue to build the capability to use open source software into Windows.

James Middleton
ACSCI/ACSCD/MCSE
Xeta Technologies
jim.middleton@xeta.com
 
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