[Speculation]Re: Windows 2000 Beta 3 and PDC?

[Alex Satrapa]

Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
> 1) are microsoft going to publish, and i mean fully document, all
> protocols required to fully integrate nt workstations into domains
> controlled by 3rd party products, such as sun's cascade, syntax's
> totalnet, samba, sco's visionfs?

Based on comments presented in the "Halloween Documents", my prediction
is that Microsoft will not do so.

I'm willing to bet Microsoft is hanging back on the "open source thing"
until it's proven to work for commercial organisations. Then they'll
find some way of entering the OSS arena in such a way that Windows users
around the world will think Microsoft *invented* OSS all by themselves.
We used to have "Where do you want to go today?" Next we'll have "Use
The Source!" I'm sure noone's used that phrase before...

> part of the benefits of such a publication are that a public release will
> generate a huge amount of goodwill towards microsoft...

But at the same time, it will expose all of the kludges that Microsoft
have put into their systems. Imagine exposing to the world that, for
example, not one Microsoft employee currently understands how Dial Up
Networking actually works? 

The next big speculative project is... how will Microsoft de-commoditise
an Open Source licence?

Alex