Bryan Lunduke on Youtube and LBRY, has as a wishful hope for the future of ReactOS.
He imagines if Microsoft with their whole "We <3 Open Source" ideal either open sourced older versions of Windows (he mentions 3.1 for Work groups, or 98 back), or better, backs/contributes code to ReactOS themselves.
One of his arguments is that either method would take minimal effort from Microsoft, and would show their love of Open Source. The code could be made available as is, and allow the ReactOS project to continue burden of development/support.
His second major argument is that Microsoft would not take a financial hit from releasing these old versions. The OS's are no longer available for purchase in stores, and MS no longer provides support. Could also convince Embrace/Extend/Extinguish gray beards that Microsoft is "changing", making them more likely to trust MS.
Ultimately he theorizes Microsoft could only make finical gain from this. This comes from the positive community views (and wallets), and they could be positioned to repackage it as a "Windows Classic". This would allow them to "sell" and support old code again that would be perfect for legacy software, yet run on modern hardware.
Making Windows open source has been brought up before, and I’m just quoting what has been said and it could be wrong, but lots of people made the claim that Windows is such an old codebase with 25+ years of different people (and, sometimes, companies) involved that it’s a huge legal task to be able to open source it. So even if it was in the interest of Microsoft they’d have to remove a lot of legacy code or track down individual contractors and get permission to do so (not to mention hardware support that may have been given to them under a proprietary license.) Again this could be bs, I’m not sure, but it makes sense if this is the case.
Will not happen while OS department is profitable, or even afterwards. They would just build on top of open source project (no source code of old IE versions).
Windows 98 could still be in used in some places for some obscure reason? Especially when you consider Windows ME and 2000 include many of the Windows 98 component. Open Sourcing those would create some security and legal problems.
Although I do wish they could start with open sourcing the Kernel.
More than their prod code, I'd love them to open their win32 test suite.
That's something that's very usable piecemeal, and is probably more useful long term than a single version of a code dump like we'd probably get if they open sourced.
It would also make an interesting companion product if the rumors of a switch to the Linux kernel turn out to be true, though more likely they'd just "Linux 10" alongside Windows for a while.
He imagines if Microsoft with their whole "We <3 Open Source" ideal either open sourced older versions of Windows (he mentions 3.1 for Work groups, or 98 back), or better, backs/contributes code to ReactOS themselves.
One of his arguments is that either method would take minimal effort from Microsoft, and would show their love of Open Source. The code could be made available as is, and allow the ReactOS project to continue burden of development/support.
His second major argument is that Microsoft would not take a financial hit from releasing these old versions. The OS's are no longer available for purchase in stores, and MS no longer provides support. Could also convince Embrace/Extend/Extinguish gray beards that Microsoft is "changing", making them more likely to trust MS.
Ultimately he theorizes Microsoft could only make finical gain from this. This comes from the positive community views (and wallets), and they could be positioned to repackage it as a "Windows Classic". This would allow them to "sell" and support old code again that would be perfect for legacy software, yet run on modern hardware.