What would happen to the ReactOS project if Microsoft decided to make Windows open source, and will it ever happen?
Posted: Thu Oct 03, 2019 9:45 am
I've already made this question on the ReactOS subreddit on Reddit, but I would also like to ask that question here in the forums since its more active and there's probably more people who are more involved in the project.
So, we know now that Microsoft is starting to "embrace" the FLOSS philosophy and has open sourced a lot of their software, such as PowerShell, parts of the .NET framework, among other things that are not "core" to the Windows operating system.
And incorporating these open source software into ReactOS would be beneficial since they allow for better compatibility since this is code coming by Microsoft and would speed up development of ReactOS without having to reverse engineer and write its own code from scratch.
But what would happen to the ReactOS project if Microsoft decided to make its Windows operating system open sourced and able to be redistributed and modified, or at least allow its code to be publicly viewed?
Now, I do think it is probably unlikely for Microsoft to completely open source Windows 10 given that it is their most current operating system that they still support (and especially since there will no longer be another "major" release and instead will be rolling updates). But it could be somewhat possible for them to open source previous unsupported versions of Windows (not saying that they are but its just speculation), such as Windows XP, since they are no longer economically viable for the company and are pretty much abandonware especially given how with Windows 10 Microsoft is phasing out Win32 and other legacy APIs in favor of UWP. And Microsoft has made very early versions of MS-DOS open source under the MIT license so it might be possible.
And so, if the goal of ReactOS is just to be compatible with NT 5.x (Windows 2000/XP/Server 2003), what would happened if Windows XP was made open source? If older unsupported versions of Windows became open source, then these operating systems could receive community support and any insecurities that were left in these versions since Microsoft stopped support for them could be patched. And this will also allow anyone to redistribute and modify the software and thus improve on it, and users don't have to pay for licensing and to have them activated which would be great if installing them across distributed systems and such. And if that was the case, then there's really no point in developing ReactOS.
If the goal is ultimately for the operating system to be compatible with current releases Windows 10 and its UWP, since I think it would be unlikely for Microsoft to make that open source, then I can see ReactOS still being viable.
What do you guys think? Do you think Microsoft would open source their previous releases to Microsoft? And if they did, do you think that ReactOS would still be developed?
So, we know now that Microsoft is starting to "embrace" the FLOSS philosophy and has open sourced a lot of their software, such as PowerShell, parts of the .NET framework, among other things that are not "core" to the Windows operating system.
And incorporating these open source software into ReactOS would be beneficial since they allow for better compatibility since this is code coming by Microsoft and would speed up development of ReactOS without having to reverse engineer and write its own code from scratch.
But what would happen to the ReactOS project if Microsoft decided to make its Windows operating system open sourced and able to be redistributed and modified, or at least allow its code to be publicly viewed?
Now, I do think it is probably unlikely for Microsoft to completely open source Windows 10 given that it is their most current operating system that they still support (and especially since there will no longer be another "major" release and instead will be rolling updates). But it could be somewhat possible for them to open source previous unsupported versions of Windows (not saying that they are but its just speculation), such as Windows XP, since they are no longer economically viable for the company and are pretty much abandonware especially given how with Windows 10 Microsoft is phasing out Win32 and other legacy APIs in favor of UWP. And Microsoft has made very early versions of MS-DOS open source under the MIT license so it might be possible.
And so, if the goal of ReactOS is just to be compatible with NT 5.x (Windows 2000/XP/Server 2003), what would happened if Windows XP was made open source? If older unsupported versions of Windows became open source, then these operating systems could receive community support and any insecurities that were left in these versions since Microsoft stopped support for them could be patched. And this will also allow anyone to redistribute and modify the software and thus improve on it, and users don't have to pay for licensing and to have them activated which would be great if installing them across distributed systems and such. And if that was the case, then there's really no point in developing ReactOS.
If the goal is ultimately for the operating system to be compatible with current releases Windows 10 and its UWP, since I think it would be unlikely for Microsoft to make that open source, then I can see ReactOS still being viable.
What do you guys think? Do you think Microsoft would open source their previous releases to Microsoft? And if they did, do you think that ReactOS would still be developed?