Microsoft Engineer: Open Source Windows Is 'Definitely Possible' 303
An anonymous reader writes: Speaking at ChefCon, Microsoft Technical Fellow Mark Russinovich talked briefly about the prospect of some or all of Windows going open source. He said, "It's definitely possible. It's a new Microsoft." Russinovich acknowledged the reality that most developers and IT workers have embraced open source software to run some or all of their machines, and that means Microsoft needs to adapt. He also noted that Microsoft is beginning to adopt a strategy familiar to open source vendors: give away the software, and then sell support and related products. "It lifts them up and makes them available for our other offerings, where otherwise they might not be. If they're using Linux technologies that we can't play with, they can't be a customer of ours."
Re:It's that damn cancer! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:It's that damn cancer! (Score:5, Informative)
Windows may have it's flaws.
But the kernel is not one of them. I played with a Nokia Windows phone 8 for work on low end hardware where Android would be downright sluggish.
It was fast, bug free, and had no issues or reboots. It is the legacy code and a million services that give it a bad name. Windows 8.1 is a fast quick OS ... but with a terrible gui which is buggy.
Re: Why not? (Score:4, Informative)
I dual-booted slackware with Linux 0.97-pl2 on my testing machine at Microsoft, and nobody gave a damn.