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Comment by chungy | Hacker News Reader

It would be neat if Windows 3.x could get open sourced, both the NT and non-NT versions.

There's probably a business argument that they're far enough removed from Windows 11 to not be a threat to Microsoft's sale of Windows 11.

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Isn't Windows itself far enough removed to not be a threat to Microsoft's bottom line these days? Wouldn't be surprised to see modern Windows going open-source or at least source-available in the coming decade.

Yeah Im surprised windows 11 isn’t open source at this point

Even presuming the will existed in Microsoft, there's enough licensed code that open sourcing it as is would probably be a non starter. Probably a more viable approach would be open sourcing individual components as the rights are cleared and eventually replacing the third party components which aren't able to be renegotiated with freely available or internally built replacements. That being said, they -might- be able to free something like WRK with only a little prodding on legal's part, and that would be interesting in itself bc NT has a quite elegant internal architecture and not too many people get to see it overall.

> there's enough licensed code that open sourcing it as is would probably be a non starter.

This is exactly what Sun wrote the CDDL for; it let them open source as many components as possible while still leaving some pieces closed. Sun also ended up releasing a bundle of binaries that you drop into a source build to get a complete /functional OpenSolaris system with the still-needed closed bits included, and over time some of those components got replaced piecemeal with FOSS alternatives (although illumos still includes some closed parts AFAIK).

That's right, I definitely had the ordeal of freeing Solaris in mind when I was writing the comment. Honestly something of a minor miracle it even happened. (also I'm pretty sure all the closed stuff got purged out of illumos?, not even using Sun compilers now, it's all gcc/binutils)

> That's right, I definitely had the ordeal of freeing Solaris in mind when I was writing the comment. Honestly something of a minor miracle it even happened.

Good to keep the successes in mind:)

> also I'm pretty sure all the closed stuff got purged out of illumos?, not even using Sun compilers now, it's all gcc/binutils

https://illumos.org/docs/developers/build/#getting-the-close... seems to say there's still some blobs in there, and gcc is a patched version. That said, yes, AIUI it's gotten better.

At this point I'll take a version of Windows X (whatever the latest is when you read this, now or ten years from now) that has all the bloat removed, or is easily removable, no ads of any kind for any Microsoft apps or services, call it Windows for Professionals, or Windows for Devs. Whatever, add a +$200 price tag to it, and I'll pay you Microsoft more money, to maintain less software (since you'd have to remove more OS specific things), just guarantee LTS for 20 years after release. No forced updates, but updates should be on a predictable schedule and security updates should be highlighted as such.

I'd add OS/2 1.x to this list of requests.

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