QS - one notion circulating among the more dispassionate observers of the open source movement is that the pool of talented engineers who are willing to put a lot of time into a project, and also have the freedom to do so, is about enough, world wide, to do one big thing at a time. Linux sucked up that talent pool (and a lot of less talented folks as well), so there wasn't much available for anything else, including Netscape.
The other part of the story is that designing a new thing from the ground up is a whole lot more interesting than maintaining that thing, or fixing someone elses thing. I have always found it easier by an order of magnitude to find good development programmers as opposed to good maintenance programmers. Of course there is a lot more maintenance work... so the general standard of people available in that pool is probably neither as good or as motivated. The response I have gotten EVERY time I present a development team with the opportunity to fix someone else's code is "It would be a lot easier to just start from ground up, this stuff is just too ugly" - or old style, or not documented well, or any other excuse to start with a clean sheet of paper.
JC apparently does not understand that the "hairball" is Windows95 and 98, not NT - that is the OS that has sold hundreds of millions of copies, and that most people are programming to. It is also the OS that MSFT has been trying to kill for 5 years now, but like the energizer bunny it keeps going and going. Finally, it is about the only OS that the DOJ thought about, and certainly the only one they took any testimony on either from a business practices or technical standpoint.
The likely scenario is that MSFT will "reluctantly" give up that codeline, which they don't want to maintain anyway... killing 2 birds with one stone. And when the open source community gets a look at it, they'll understand how come MSFT never fixed it - they won't want to fix it either. It will become an interesting historical artifact, but based on market share and all of the law in the current DOJ case, it will satisfy the requirements since NT was hardly mentioned in the DOJ proceedings and the finding of fact is done.
The APIs for NT are already very well mapped - I don't think the borg could do any better.
As far as more thoroughly documenting the "Windows" APIs... and they'll all be out on the front lawn barfing after looking at the hairball...
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