Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Breaking up is hard to do...

Author:Nick Sweeney
Posted:4/27/2000; 8:46:16 AM
Topic:scriptingNews outline for 4/27/2000
Msg #:16742 (In response to 16739)
Prev/Next:16741 / 16743

The past couple of days' discussion on the merits and demerits of open source seems relevant to the fate of Microsoft. I'd be happy to see the company remain in its current form. But I'm with those who'd rather see full disclosure of the internal specifications to the Windows API: the undocumented hooks, the tweaks which put Microsoft's own application developers a step ahead of the competition. Because even if you bisect the OS from the applications at the corporate level, you retain that privileged knowledge.

People have said that there's a difference between "open source", which is theoretically easy to modify but often impractical to do so, and and "open architectures" like Frontier, which may hide its source but bear its technical soul. It's about time that Windows became an open architecture. Transparently so.

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