Microsoft Source Code

[atif.muhammad]

Shouldn't Microsoft be forced to share its source code with the PC manufacturers? or it could do an Apple. Become a hard-soft ware production company. That would be a disaster....

[edesignuk]

er...why? It's their code, they wrote it and pay for the development of it. Besides that, what the hell would PC manufactures want with it, all they do is install it on their systems and ship it of to you (the customer).

[iMeowbot]

Both DEC and IBM had the NT sources. They were actively involved in the PowerPC and Alpha porting efforts, and contributed back some of the higher-level stuff too. I'd be surprised if there weren't still vendors with this kind of access; Compaq and Sony, for two examples, still like to ship tweaked versions of Windows.

[atif.muhammad]

but at the end of the day, its MS.
would you like to see it suffer more?

[iMeowbot]

I'm convinced that if Gates hadn't established a software monopoly, someone like-minded would have done so, possibly Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs or Charles Wang. IBM were restrained by the courts from maintaining such a position; otherwise, they would still be doing it.

[LeeTom]

A computer is a computer.
Software is software.

I use all sorts. I tend to use the stuff I like more, and the stuff I don't less. It keeps me happy. And that's all.

Lee Tom

[MoparShaha]

Stop spamming the community discussion.

[JFreak]

Both DEC and IBM had the NT sources. They were actively involved in the PowerPC and Alpha porting efforts, and contributed back some of the higher-level stuff too.

actually, they wrote the major part of the NT core and micro$oft just paid them for it. in fact, the longhorn is FIRST operating system microsoft tries to code by themselves, after getting 20 years "experience from other companies code" :D

[iMeowbot]

actually, they wrote the major part of the NT core and micro$oft just paid them for it. in fact, the longhorn is FIRST operating system microsoft tries to code by themselves, after getting 20 years "experience from other companies code" :D

Something like that. The design work for OS/2 definitely came from IBM; MS were hired to code it. That's why Windows and OS/2 PM ended up with different APIs, to wriggle out of the ownership situation. IBM didn't really get heavily involved in OS/2 coding until the "divorce" in the mid-1990s.

NT really was complete rewrite of OS/2, heavily based on design ideas from DEC's canceled Emerald OS. (Emerald would have been the OS for the PRISM CPU, which eventually became Alpha.) DEC weren't really aware of how much of Emerald went into NT until the Alpha porting work started, and it was enough to result in a hefty settlement.

Later, DEC did voluntarily make some contributions to NT. Networking/clustering and job control are areas where a lot of work was needed. In those days, DEC still ate their own dog food, and since the company was gearing up to sell NT, people tried very hard to make the stuff work for internal systems. Architectural similarities aside, NT was definitely not VMS. Scads of core functionality was missing, or present but didn't work. There were in-house fixes for many of these problems, but looking at modern-day Windows I can see that quite a few of those fixes were never incorporated back at MS. Oh well, it was a learning experience :)

(NT could run OS/2 1.x software, using compatibility libraries that did use some OS/2 code. The kernel was too different to use much there.)