There are actually some strong OS voices in Microsoft. I was at Solutions Linux in France (around 2006 iirc) and there was a Microsoft booth. Since our booth had some downtime I talked to the guy manning their booth who was kind of stranded between Linux distros and FLOSS companies.

He was pretty cool and genuinely trying to advance OS within Microsoft but said it's a pretty frustrating experience overall (his descriptions of the internal processes at Microsoft were pretty interesting). Seems like they have come a long way since, I hope he's still working there. I should have his card somewhere at home :)

So as far as I know there have been developers who were pushing to open source a lot of infrastructure/language stuff for quite some time.

Edit: I think it's no coincidence we see this happening now that Ballmer is gone. He was kind of the villain in the "let's open source stuff" stories I heard.

I must say, I'm very impressed with all of the open source moves that MS has done lately. I wonder if that will drive more adoption of C# and cause Oracle to open up Java. I'm not a fan of C# because it's basically only used on windows systems, despite xamarin and et al.

What effect will this have on the ability to boost driver support in Linux, if any? FreeBSD has ndisgen [1], but would this help improve that or a broader set of driver use in Linux?

Secondly, what about WINE?

[1]: https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=ndisgen

This is slightly off topic. However maybe someone on this thread can point me in the right direction. Can anyone recommend some good resources to get started writing low-level drivers for windows (books or open source examples)? I work mostly with embedded software on custom project. From time to time I need to interface with Windows machines and the information of this topic has always been limited.

One barrier to developing drivers for Windows is the driver signing policy https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff... which requires you to pay for a software publisher certificate.

The open-sourcing is a sign that MSFT is in a tricky spot (BYOD, mobile, tablet, games) and desperately needs to improve relations with the outside world. Expect we'll also see MSFT using more open source in products to compete effectively though I wonder what'd happen with internal best practices that the outside world doesn't have, e.g. SAL. Will they contribute back? Let's see.

Inside MSFT there used to be minimal credit for releasing source which was a strong inhibitor in the employee review process. And a gratuitously awkward internal process for open sourcing code with no path for accepting changes/contributions. Attitudes are definitely improving.

The major benefit of this particular move will be when you're working on Windows drivers - now you can see and completely grok what a piece of code does until it transitions into the kernel proper.

"we understand there’s no substitute for having OS source available" Ho ho ho.

Will it help making drivers for filesystems which MS doesn't care to support?

I don't see a patent grant...

Whiny ass comments so far. Bravo Microsoft!

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." -Gandhi

I hope Microsoft knows this, but Open Source doesn't imply putting your source on GitHub (and vise-versa). If Microsoft dev teams served source tarballs along with their releases, we'd be just as happy. But perhaps they will actually use the GitHub issue trackers and other neat features, as they are pretty useful.