Free Software Foundations effort to make Windows 7 open source

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.

Open sourcing large proprietary software products like this involves:

- Licensing agreements with potentially thousands of third parties (Adobe, Apple, Xerox, IBM, SCO, Oracle to name a few)

- Trade secrets (also thousands, involving third parties)

- Distribution restrictions

- Export controls

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't be done.