right, the question here is simple: what makes a windows a windows?
is windows nt the real windows because it's what m$ peddles now? or is win9x the real windows because it was there before nt? is mswindows (i mean the GUI/program for DOS) the real windows because it was the first windows? how do you think the source code compares between the different versions?
also, is windows the kernel, the GUI or the whole system? mswindows was originally a GUI program. it didn't have a kernel. NT and win9x have different kernels (so we are told) but perhaps the apps and tools are the same, but compiled for the right kernel (you're not telling me they rewrote notepad, write and pbrush just for NT for example). So the only code that is common to all three versions of windows is apps such as notepad, mspaint and so on.
even diary, clock, mail, media programs included with the system have been overhauled, scrapped or rewritten a number of times, so what is windows really?
Also, you throw in the open source thing. This is completely loaded. 'Open source' is an even worse term than 'free software' was. So they open the source, so what? we get to read the source! nobody has the right to modify and redistribute it, so what's the difference? the only difference is that everybody can see the holes in the security, and the bloating spyware. They cannot change any of it without a GPL like licence agreement and that will not come from Microsoft. They will use 'open source' in many contexts in the coming years you can bet, but it will never mean what it was intended to mean. Microsoft are more interested in besmirching the reputation of open source and making people distrustful of it than they are in actually releasing true open source code.
Due to M$'s security by obscurity model, the open source but nobody can change it model would just make windows even more insecure than it already is, if you can believe that, since the holes would be there for all to see, but for nobody to fix.
You throw in the thing about Microsoft fixing holes and bugs promptly, but what does that mean? it's like the police needing 'reasonable suspicion' to get a warrant to raid somebody's house for drugs! the term "promptly" or whatever word you actually used is meaningless. Say some huge hole existed. 5000 script kiddies see it (in the open source code) write an exploit program, or hack into people's boxes, so maybe six or seven hours later, possibly longer depending on working hours, holidays and so on, somebody notices, and calls Microsoft up. Their staff (a hundred people? how many? how many people can be spared to drop work they are already busy on for such an effort?) works on it during office hours only, after getting given the message by whoever took the complaint, and possibly this person took an hour or two to pass on the message due to having to finish the shift, or whatever, or maybe the message gets passed in an email that doesn't get opened immediately. You know what companies are like, if employees can pass the buck they often will.
So then the patch gets released, and how long did it take? longer than if some guy spotted the hole in the first place, fixed it and sent it in to the project coordinator all in one hit. People doing something for the love of it, not the money, do a better job. Capitalists find this abhorrent and difficult to digest, preferring to believe for their own peace of mind that people who are being paid do a better job than those who are not.
Now, let's say for argument's sake that 'open source' means a windows totally under the GPL, though that will never happen unless it is a windows imitator, like FreeDOS imitates MSDOS, or linux imitates minix (that's a bad example actually). So anyway, if a GPLd windows came out, the code would be fucking terrible! to the point where people would descend on it like vultures, rewriting the whole thing! now there are two ways this could go (three actually but we'll get to that) so:
1. a: Microsoft release windows as GPL software, but they coordinate the code that gets submitted for the next release, as we assume they have decided to turn everything around quickly, development goes fast, but Microsoft get the final control over what goes into the system. The system never gets any better as a result despite people's best efforts and quickly people stop submitting code.
1. b: Microsoft release windows as GPL software, people get fed up that Microsoft are still coordinating the effort and multiple patched versions of windows start flying about, each one optimised for different purposes (think netBSD, OpenBSD and FreeBSD, but a lot more warped) people go over M$'s heads and very soon no windows is really compatible with any other windows. Either that or you need several versions of windows to really perform several tasks to any degree of efficiency.
2: Microsoft release windows as GPL and allow an independent coordinator to assume control. This will never happen. I dare anybody to tell me why M$ would ever do this.
In the end i have this to say: windows NT is a clone of win9x, designed to do the same thing, but more stable, written from scratch. win9x in turn is based on mswindows, which, as a full operating system, was simply DOS running a GUI. DOS, in its own turn, is a simplified, bastardised imitation of unix, with no attempt made to plan for the future regarding networking, scaling, permissions, data storage, basically averything that has been 'improved' since the days of DOS has been done with a quick and dirty hack, because there was literally no elbow room in the code to do it properly.
Now that we have reverse geneticised DOS, i put it to you that if windows was GPLd, and if all people's best changes were put into practice, you could go and check a year or two later and find that in fact, windows was now unix.
