Will Windows become Open Source?

Microsoft’s open source strategy is interesting. Microsoft currently publishes 3836 repositories on GitHub. By chance I came across the following new repository: Extensible Storage Engine. It is published under the MIT License.

But if you read in the README.md file and look at Wikipedia, this is actually not a new project, it’s a pretty old one. A database that has been part of every Windows installation and some Microsoft products for many years.

First shipping in Windows NT 3.51 and shortly thereafter in Exchange 4.0, and rewritten twice in the 90s, and heavily updated over the subsequent two decades after that, it remains a core Microsoft asset to this day.

It may be a naive thought, but can we see here that Microsoft is releasing more and more parts of Windows as open source?

Windows will probably remain a proprietary product for some time, but I can imagine that the trend of releasing more and more code will continue.

It is understandable that Microsoft will not make Windows completely open source from one day to the next, that would probably also pose a threat or two to Microsoft, as well as Windows users.

But step by step to an open source Windows, that would be a fine thing.

Interactions & Comments