Can windows embrace open source in the future?

The advent of Microsoft's Windows operating system has been nearly 29, during which Windows has always been firmly in control of desktop dominance, but with the recent changes in the industry upstream pattern and the vigorous movement of the "geo-discovery" campaign, Windows is facing a threat from multi-directional pluralism, most of which is a threat from open source forces.

Careful people should find that while Windows operating systems still occupy more than 90% PC desktops, their brands are less influential than they used to be; a more careful person may also find that the influence of the Open-source system has risen rather than the decline in Windows ' influence. Indeed, in the 90 's, thanks to Microsoft's commercial crackdown, Linux as the representative of the open source operating system desktop market share has not been more than 2%, but in recent years Google's active in the field of open source and the rise of the Android system, And even the retirement of XP systems and the recent exposure of Chinese government procurement to stop WINDOWS8 system procurement events can be seen, Windows system is facing an unprecedented test. A number of open source agencies have recently claimed to help XP users migrate smoothly to Linux systems. I rough estimate, aside from China's huge market, there are at least 25% desktop users around the world to use XP system, these users have not upgraded to Win7 and do not intend to use WIN8, if one-third of such users in the future to switch to Linux operating system, The foundation of Microsoft Windows is also a big shake. The Linux and open source communities that have been quiet for years are at the forefront of the industry.

The feud between open source and Microsoft is long, and it has to do with the history of the operating system and the origins of the open source movement.

The UNIX system that changed the history of computer Science in the 1969 was developed at Bell Labs in the American At&t company. 10 years later, in order to perfect the system, at&t the source code to the University scientific research institutions for research and modification, during which Unix produced many variants, the most famous is the University of California, Berkeley's BSD system. The growing influence of BSD systems and the high commercial value of the system led directly to the At&t company's battle with a growing and enduring lawsuit. The incident has had a great impact on the hacker community and culture, and many hackers and competent programmers, driven by business interests, have thrown themselves into the development and operation of proprietary software by abandoning the previously shared and collaborative software development Spirit. Microsoft and its windows were born in such a big context.

In those days, the trend of software patenting was despised by Richard Stallman, the backbone of an early hacker culture, especially Microsoft and the Windows operating system as "heretics". The fanatical young man, who preached the "free" spirit of the software, published the GNU Declaration in 1983 and established the Free Software Foundation in 1985. During the development of the free Software movement, Finnish student Linus Torvalds developed the Linux kernel, and Richard Stallman tried to persuade Torvalds to include Linux in the GNU program, which, although unsuccessful, was eventually released under the terms of the GNU General Public License, enabling the GNU program to be basically completed, The free software movement has also grown.

In the late 80 and throughout the 90, while free software developed, its drawbacks became apparent, as programmers lacked enough revenue to make ends meet, and more and more people began to move out of the camp and into big companies like Microsoft. Richard? An important companion of Stallman, Eric? Recognizing the seriousness of the problem, Raymond criticized Stallman's free software movement and his idealism, and published in 1997 the famous "Cathedral and Bazaar" to transform the free software movement through open source collaboration and more practical, market-specific tools. , resulting in an open source movement. Since then, the open source movement and the free Software movement have parted ways.

And then, as we all know, although open source software is difficult to compete against Microsoft in market share, its openness to commercial companies has ensured its survival and viability until Google's rise. Google took advantage of the convenience of open source software and put its advantage to the extreme, through the first-served mobile internet layout, so that Android, Google Chrome browser and a large number of open source applications to seize the market, and gradually penetrate and erode the Microsoft desktop market share, resulting in a threat to the Windows ecological closed loop.

Shimo, The. Despite Microsoft's loss of opportunities in the Internet and mobile sectors, the market share of the vast desktop and low-end server operating systems still sustains its upstream giants, a maintenance that relies on windows as its core revenue model. Despite these years of Microsoft in Bing Search, cloud computing, artificial intelligence and other areas of the attack, the intention to change the status quo, but the strategic transformation is a long process, the current stage of the main line of defense Windows ecosystem once breached, will become Microsoft for many years dare not imagine the nightmare.

Now that the Windows operating system has come to a point where the handheld cannot shake the Android Market, the PC side cannot be too much of an alternative to its own XP or Win7 system. So an issue arises spontaneously-why not try to embrace open source?

For the past 20 years, Microsoft has not chosen open source, the main reason is that the commercial foundation of Windows is too deep, operating system sales, licensing fees constitute the main source of Microsoft's revenue. And now there is an obvious benefit in trying to open up windows in the run-up to Microsoft's strategic transformation.

Mr. Ballmer retired before retiring with a "equipment and services" strategy, which opened the vanguard of Microsoft's strategic transformation, and after Nadra succeeded to the CEO, he developed and repeated the "move first, cloud first" strategic plan. At Microsoft's latest quarterly 2014Q3 earnings release, Nadra said Microsoft's future consideration of Windows was how to install it on a wider range of devices, enabling it to participate in areas such as wearable devices and the internet of things, and to build larger ecosystems for mobile and cloud strategic services.

All of this means that Microsoft's future strategic focus will shift to diversification, and windows will be a diversified strategic services, then operating system sales and authorized revenue is no longer the only revenue focus. That being the case, an open source of Windows will be better suited to Microsoft's current transition strategy.

The main benefit of open source is to allow more people to see the source code, so that more programmers involved in software development and modification, the absorption of community intelligence to improve software quality. Today, large data and cloud computing technologies provide a powerful boost to the customization and development efficiency of open source software. Putting Windows under open source rules, allowing more people to participate in the personalized design of Windows, is no doubt more than the hate tile interface several times, so that more people to join the team to catch bugs, so that errors nowhere, the same than Microsoft Gesanchaiwu push paste patch more efficient.

Another consideration is a taste of the same, since Google can take advantage of open source power to occupy the market, Microsoft is also the case. The Windows platform has a natural advantage over the compatibility of traditional software and gaming software, and imagine that an operating system that occupies 90% of the desktop market, once open source, is bound to break the existing open source landscape and impose a strong deterrent against all competing products.

An open source Windows will also give hardware vendors more choice. The current wide range of open source licenses, the open source rules of the wider range of BSD, MIT, Apache, LGPL license, and so on, which Google's use of BSD and Apache license. Microsoft can choose more than a few more flexible open source licenses or a single, license to authorize the hardware manufacturers to integrate different versions of the operating system, and they only need to firmly grasp the Windows kernel. This results in a much better penetration of mobile handsets, wearable devices and other intelligent devices than the operating system. Because Microsoft now wants to capture more devices than sell more systems.

Of course, windows open source is not no harm, which means that Microsoft will lose operating system sales and authorized revenue, which may be difficult for Microsoft to bear, but in the long run, the open source strategy for Microsoft's strategic transformation to help greatly. For Microsoft, a big company that lacks open source genes, open source can be incremental, and perhaps the smartest to start with IE.