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Free Software Foundations effort to make Windows 7 open source

3 pointsby rakibtgover 5 years ago

1 comment

kstenerudover 5 years ago
Campaigns like these shake my confidence in the FSF as a serious organization because it shows how little they understand about large, private software projects.<p>Open sourcing large proprietary software products like this involves:<p>- Licensing agreements with potentially thousands of third parties (Adobe, Apple, Xerox, IBM, SCO, Oracle to name a few)<p>- Trade secrets (also thousands, involving third parties)<p>- Distribution restrictions<p>- Export controls<p>Tracking down all involved parties is hard enough. Getting them all to agree is even harder, and more often than not is impossible. I suspect that even if all of the brass at Microsoft were keen on open sourcing Windows 7, it still couldn&#x27;t be done.