Microsoft Windows 7 and Open Source

You might be wondering why I have chosen such an eccentric title for this post. Microsoft and Open Source don’t go with each other. And if you are a Windoze bunny, you might have probably downloaded the beta version of the next installment of Windows, i.e Windows 7. If you haven’t you can check the screenshots here. If a first glance at the screenshots make you gape in awe, then you probably haven’t touched a glass of wine before. If it doesn’t look interesting to you then probably you drink a lot of wine. But what has wine to do with Windows. Wine has everything to do with Windows. Wine is a Windows Emulator for linux. Seeing the screenshots, I can only infer one thing. Microsoft is finally doing justice to the name of its OS. It’s quite evident that the previous versions didn’t have much transparency and subsequent versions have been having increased transparency. Who knows, probably Windows 15 will have a very high transparency that you can actually see your neighbour through your monitor just as you can through a window. Now I get the pun in the OS’s name.

If transparency is what users care, then probably Microsoft can release a patch every year with which users can tweak the transparency. And for just moving the slider in the patch to set the transparency, a flock of dunces call Microsoft support asking for instructions on how to do it. But Microsoft is clear in its approach. It targets the casual user, i.e the absolute novice who needs 10 months of reading of all those “For Dummies” book series to understand a fact that 1+1=2.:)

Many don’t understand why Microsoft is against Open Source and GPL. GPL, i.e General Public License binds open source software. Any software licensed with GPL makes it mandatory that any code derived out of it shall be released again as Open Source. Microsoft is especially against this clause because they cannot roll out a proprietary product from modifying an open source project as they released softwares like DOS, Visual Basic after procuring it from someone else.

Anyway, I haven’t tried Windows 7 myself and have no intentions to download it and use it. And I don’t know whether the screenshots posted on the other page are authentic. So I don’t take any responsibility if Windows 7 is actually worse or better.

And one more thing, I wanted to write about was GTA 4. I’ve stopped playing the game. Got bored! In fact, I lost interest in the game after seeing a website on one of the in-game tw@ internet centers. It was a mock of Linux. The mock changes the name to ‘Eunux’ and you can catch a glimpse of a clone of that site here. All that I can say is that R* has tarnished its reputation by doing this. Probably, Microsoft had a role to play in the making of the site. Who knows? Whatever may be, building an open source game like GTA won’t take much time if all the open source pioneers in the world come together. They can build a city of huge dimensions and can bankrupt R*. But, I guess people in the linux world have better things to do for the people than to have a stupid bozo whisking a couple of berratas and shooting everyone around.