"Microsoft Windows is likely to become open source operating system, and it will be a new Windows" - that is what Mark Russinovich - Microsoft's top engineer announced at a recent seminar. The memorable thing in Russinovich's talk, when he asked how many of the audience use Windows for their work, only one young man put his arm up high in a hall with several hundred others. However, this does not make Russinovich surprise, because as he says: "That is the reality of the world we live in today." Engineers prefer using the open-source operating system - which allows them to intervene and further customize their work. And Microsoft knows it.
Technological
world is changing every day, and the big guns always know how to change to suit
the new trend. Microsoft itself has begun to accept this game while allowing
the Linux operating system to use the cloud
service Azure - through its
Internet. Even the number of Linux computers using this service accounts for
20%.
This
is fairly new compared to the consistent policy of Microsoft, as Windows
operating system traditionally never shares the "lifeblood" of it for
anyone else. And of course, you would never expect Microsoft to change that in
a few days, weeks or months to just after Russinovich's speech. Microsoft Windows is still the "money
picking tree", and it is not easy to drop it off in a simple way before
figuring out how to profit in the case of turning this operating system into
open source. However, the moves such as cut down the cost of purchasing the OS,
or getting 1 year free use (may be just an action to stimulate users) recently
showed that MS was much "opener" in taking this OS to users.
In
fact, not until Russinovich' speech at ChefConf, has Microsoft cared about this
issue. Earlier this year, Microsoft has opened the source of one of the most
popular application development tools today: .NET. By this move, the company
expected that programmers would have more choices to develop software or
applications whether they were running Linux or Mac OS X.
In
parallel with that action, Microsoft also is considering how to gradually make
a profit without selling Windows anymore. The most likely solution to this question
is probably upgrade services, protect, distribute and update the operating
system, because even after owning a free operating system, large enterprises
still need a guarantee of safety for their work. But in general, opening source
of an operating system is not as easy as converting a game chargeable to the
Free-to-play, it is a complex story of suppliers, distributing/ editing units
and users.
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