I will be branded as a troll, but I have to say it... Would it hurt MS to make a few of their apps Open Source? Things like Notepad and Paint dont make them any money, so they arent giving away anything of real value. But, any improvements made by the community might really improve the value of a stock Windows installation.

There''s no reason for MS to make anything Open Source because they can make and release final products faster than the Open Source community and they have thousands of people working on various things to improve products that need improvement.

There are probably far more dedicated people working on Windows actually making real progress than people working on Open Source products.

If anyone wants to make a better product, no one is stopping them. MS has no obligation to give people a head start.

Open Source requires a lot of control otherwise projects get trashed. Linux has had releases with trojans et al included. CDex has a spyware version thanks to some jerkoff.

If MS needed more help they''d hire it.

It''s a lot easier that way. It''d be really annoying and confusing for the mass market to have a dozen versions of the same product and MS would be responsible for them all even though they didn''t make the "improved" versions simply because it has their name on it.

Ben


IcarusIndie.com


KalvinB - (to Jessika) do you accept Jesus as your lord and savior

Jessika - Sure I can accept all forms of payment.

I definately agree, since they would eventually all be incompatible. This is one of the banes of open source software, is that not only are versions often incompatible, but cross software compatiblity can also be nonexistant.


Gamedev for learning.
libGDN for putting it all together.
An opensource, cross platform, cross API game development library.

werd to microsoft

James Simmons
MindEngine Development
http://medev.sourceforge.net

More importantly. Who cares? Notepad is meant to extremely simple. I could write an identical program in two hours. If you want a more full featured "notepad" then use Word. Paint is the same story. It wouldn''t be a two hour job, but there''s nothing special.

To be honest... I wouldn't even want the windows xp source code. It would be next to worthless to me

James Simmons
MindEngine Development
http://medev.sourceforge.net

[edited by - neurokaotix on June 3, 2003 2:44:01 AM]

lol.. make 1 simple change, and get 9999 errors and 9999 warnings in 9999 files

www.cppnow.com

quote: Original post by ironfroggy
I will be branded as a troll, but I have to say it...

Would it hurt MS to make a few of their apps Open Source? Things like Notepad and Paint dont make them any money, so they arent giving away anything of real value. But, any improvements made by the community might really improve the value of a stock Windows installation.

They have released the source for a lot of stuff, including some version of Windows CE and parts of the .NET Framework.

Do a search for "Rotor" on microsoft''s site.

Hehe... actually Notepad/WordPad are "open source". Just check out the Platform SDK