Wesley Parish

CHCH, NZ

network admin

In relation ot Free and Open Source software, Microsoft has already made some very tentative steps towards recognizing that MS Windows is more a platform than a product. They've released WinCE 6 under a highly ambiguous "Shared Source" license, that doesn't offer nearly enough to system builders; and they've released a version of the NT kernel under one of their Academic "Shared Source" licenses, that again, doesn't offer nearly as much as the competing offerings such as Linux, Minix, the *BSD family, OpenSolaris or other related offerings such as Syllable, HaikuOS, ReactOS, or such, license terms.

All that is needed is to adopt realistic license terms for those products, and accept that it is a viable way to develop a platform.

The real fun's going to come when they realize that the same thing applies to their decision to make MS Office a platform instead of leaving it as a product. That's where the real test of their mettle is going to be.