<< just because open source people today are, for lack of a better term, "counter-cultural," >>
You could use this term, but you have to be more careful than I was in defining this. For instance, far-right and far-left and moderate privacy types are part of the crew, as are folks that believe that overly powerful companies need a counterbalance to their wealth, folks who just have been burned by MSFT, folks who believe that engineers have social responsibilities similar to scientists, doctors and architects, and so forth. (And even a few folks, maybe 1%, with long grey hair and Birkenstocks :-)
They are, as I said, social activists and volunteers. They are working for free. They are people who get excited by ideals and ideas. As such, in this culture, they are also wary and skeptical, because they know the what the real score is for the majority as well. So if you want them to work on Windows for free via open source, there has to be a unifying idealism to it, a big idea, and proof that MSFT could not turn around and screw them on it, which is what they would expect at this point.
These are $100,000 a year people. Perhaps they are countercultural in the sense that wealthy Quakers were countercultural during the Vietnam war or pre-Civil War days. Perhaps they have a rebellious streak, too.
They are people from across the political, gender, and age spectrums, who agree on one point. That is, that there is a great deal of common computer functionality that could be provided cheaply or freely using a different production and distribution paradigm that that which exists now, and that this can co-exist with the businesses that they work for or own themselves. This is similar to the model in science, with shared resources and information and some owned resources.
They are tired of everyone having to rewrite the same damn application over and over, tired of being like Sysifus, pushing the same damn rock up the same damn hill (as someone here said), over again for each OS upgrade that unnecessarily kills off their application. Almost universally, they are tired of MSFT. They are almost all very intelligent people who think of themselves as a resource that society is supposed to use wisely, not apply to one useless if tricky task after another.
<< Further, might it not be possible that the kinds of developers an open source Windows might appeal to are a different breed than those who work on Linux and Mozilla? >>
I don't know. I can only talk about my experience. I work for pay on Windows systems, but worked for free on the early Internet. The Internet was clearly a group resource. Plus the code hadn't been schlocked up already. I also donated a number of apps and the source for them on Compuserve, when it was a conduit for free software, but that also was a common way to share with a large group of people then. I wrote a Targa graphics board driver for UNIX and donated it but that was because the users would be early computer artists, getting it through the Rhode Island School of Design. I wrote some programs for design of electric power lines that were donated to the common national pool of software used by both for-profit and PUD power providers. And so forth. I haven't done any work on Linux myself so I may be speaking out of turn, but I will let those folks correct me on that if they want to.
You see that the common thread here is the idea that the end user would get this for free or nearly so. In some cases a particular group was the beneficiary, sometimes everyone.
The only way I could see this for Windows is if MSFT totally gave up control and profits on Windows, and also agree not to compete with it. And over IE as well, that being 'an integral part of the Windows 98 experience.' I just can't see that happening. But if MSFT were willing to totally give up Windows and NT, including older code so we could go back to a smaller code base to start working from, it could be done. I think this is necessary: Note that Netscape and Java are examples where only partial openness has not worked out so well.
But why? Why not just put a friendly front end and installer on Linux, and give it a SoftWindows type of shell to run the other stuff with? Then you could appear to boot up in Windows, even , if you wanted to. If MSFT would allow it, that is.
Chaz |
