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Comment by SteveNuts | Hacker News Reader

I have a strange feeling that the next version will be based on Linux kernel

What is it in tech with this obsession with consolidation? Alternatives and competition is healthy and as much as I love Linux the NT kernel is a fantastic piece of engineering as well.

Why would they throw away all driver compatibility and force themselves to rewrite all the userland libraries?

With Intel's acquisition of SiFive... for Windows to support RISC V they'd need to do that anyway. They did it for ARM64 (partially) and are struggling. They have to do bunch of stuff via emulation instead.

Windows on ARM wasn't really a success story. Don't know if I would be so enthusiastic about RISC V.

I would like it, we need more open hardware. But I have no illusion that vendors like Microsoft, Google or Apple will first try to find a way to lock their systems down.

Eh, not really. Windows NT has always been designed for multiple architectures. Well-written applications (and to some extent drivers) just need recompiling for the new architecture.

Changing to a completely different kernel would be something else.

Totally agree and I think Windows based on Linux kernel makes no sense... yet imagine the year of the Linux desktop coming true for real?

Even if they moved to the Linux kernel, which I think is incredibly unlikely and undesirable, they would have to replace so much of the disparately developed (and quite garbage) Linux Desktop userspace that you couldn't call it Linux Desktop any more than you could say the same about Android.

...that was the joke

> and force themselves to rewrite all the userland libraries?

They already did a lot of that for the Linux port of SQL Server, which as I understand it is basically the same program running with a bundled compatibility layer that's basically an official Microsoft equivalent of WINE.

Why? The Linux kernel is GPL and that move would anger a lot of Windows driver developers who need to support a shim or release their source.

Their newest tablet already ships with Android and not windows (which uses Linux in all its GPL goodness.) I wouldn't be surprised if they just started shipping Android with some wine-like backwards compatibility environment. It sounds crappy but have you used Windows lately? You can tell that they know it's a dead end.

Isn't Google looking to replace Android with Fuchsia?

True, the only way I could see that happen is if they not only include a compatibility layer for the application side but also a way for the kernel to host old Windows driver binaries. No idea how easy, difficult or completely impossible that would be.

You can have proprietary drivers even though the Linux kernel is GPL.

That's legally debatable and while nvidia just goes ahead and does it, not all companies are as willing to step into legally-murky territory.

Microsoft would never make the base of their system open source. It is fundamentally opposite to how Microsoft does business.

All the stuff they have recently released as open-source speaks otherwise. The problem why they will most likely never be able to open-source Windows is rather that they bought a lot of third-party components for the system that they simply aren't allowed to open-source. They'd probably have to rebuild half of the system to be able to open-source it, and that's the unlikely part.

I'm pretty sure there's even pieces of the broader system that they don't have source to outright; pinball was an example, and that one piece of Office... equation editor? Anyways, right; even if they absolutely wanted to open source everything right now, they certainly don't have ownership of everything needed to do that, and while they probably have the actual code for most things it's not necessarily guaranteed.

It wouldn't need to be open source. They would make closed-source distro with custom kernel modules and packages.

Just like MacOS.

Darwin is BSD-licensed (it's a FreeBSD derivative after all), that's a huge difference to the copyleft GPL license of the Linux kernel. See e.g. the VMware vs Linux story for the implications of that.

MacOS isn't Linux-based.

Doing that would take years of effort, I don't think they would be capable of keeping such a secret for so long.

And then have a trillion vendors messing with forked forks of the kernel that nobody knows how to merge. No thanks.

Force the bastards to open and include their drivers in the mainline kernel or perish as Microsoft bars them from supporting Windows. They would trip over themselves to do just that.

You might just be right.

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