Ask HN: Do you think MS will ever open source Windows?
It would be the ultimate olive branch to the open source world and would fully commit them to a managed windows / software as a service company I think. What they might gain is much faster codebase cleanup if they went this route and said: “Hey help is clean up our old win3.1 bloat and unneeded backwards compatibility or legacy code”. Or they could open source it in hopes to create some sort of windows Linux hybrid.
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Think of it as a game of monopoly.
Microsoft got lucky and bought the pink and the orange street, got hotels over it. It was enjoying a good revenue.
But then few people(the open source community - chiefly Linus) bought the brown street and the blue street, which aren't much costly. But it affected the monopoly of Microsoft. So, Microsoft is breaking the hotels now. But still has a lot of houses on its land.
For Microsoft to loosen up, either we need some big projects coming up(a substitute for Microsoft) - consider this the green and the dark blue street. These projects, as their street names suggest, need to be heavily ambitious. Or we need a bad phase for Microsoft.
What I want to say is, Microsoft won't be making Windows open source until it has Monopoly.