David J. Craig wrote:
How can you have competition when they don’t charge for the free stuff. I
understand they removed source code because too many other developers were
taking their code and writing a commercial product. I would be torqued off
too. OSR doesn’t release source code to anything and their DeviceTree uses
several interesting techniques that most of us would like to see how to
implement even if we don’t have a reason or real need. I think one of the
sysinternals guys works for Microsoft now, so maybe some of the newer
versions are using things that can only be done if you have seen the source
code to Windows.Even though I am currently looking for a job with only consulting to keep me
going, I still think that anyone should be able to sell their services for
whatever the market will pay. Some of this has contributed to the move of
software jobs to India, China, and eastern Europe, but from the questions I
have seen some of this stuff is beyond most of their skill sets and they
keep asking for “free sample source codes”. I can’t see sysinternals
helping them take more jobs either. Enlightened self interest is good.
Many companies are leaving California for similar reasons.
(Big rant/wish-list follows. 
Sysinternals has every right to make money off their work, but the fact
that they are a regular business now restricts what they can do for the
community. I don’t necessarily agree that the GPL is the best model for
software development, but I do think that open-source benefits everybody
and sports little risk for well-written commercial products.
To take an example, if there were decent AV, VPN, and firewall
open-source Windows utilities out there, this would put pressure on the
commercial vendors of same to improve their products. One VPN product
from a big-name vendor that I used to use insisted on installing some
sort of ‘adaptive packet prediction’ filter on my system. This filter
made it impossible to play online games because it seemed to pend
packets and send them out in periodic bursts, adding latency not
noticeable by a sales guy downloading PowerPoint slides but fatal for
the space marine shooting railguns. And this filter was in operation
even when the VPN wasn’t connected, for all network traffic to any
destination! Every time I wanted to play Quake 3 I had to uninstall the
damn thing and reboot. Bad show!
And I have similar stories for various AV and firewall products I’ve tried.
To shift track a little bit, I wholeheartedly approve efforts by
Microsoft to get into the VPN and AV business themselves as long as the
software community cannot produce acceptable, reliable alternatives.
However, I believe that Microsoft should instead be encouraging the
software community in this regard by exposing the source code to
Windows. Microsoft can write the best VPN and AV utilities both because
it has smart people and because those people can see the source code.
Any other group of equally smart people are at an automatic
disadvantage. If the disadvantage wasn’t there, Microsoft wouldn’t NEED
to spend resources on writing these utilities themselves. Microsoft
makes money off of Windows, not off of the XP defrag utility. It would
be great if third-party developers didn’t have to work as hard inducting
themselves into the high priesthood of Windows internals to produce
reliable code (not that the priesthood isn’t fun, but it’s still a
priesthood).
Driver frameworks are a good idea, but they don’t radically decrease the
time needed to develop a driver. Abstractions always leak (thanks Joel
Spolsky for his article on this topic), and 90% of a software engineer’s
time is spent plugging these leaks. Having the source code behind the
binary code that you are smashing your forehead against is the only way
to drastically reduce the time needed to plug these leaks.
And I don’t buy the IP argument against exposing the source. Microsoft
makes money not because the page trimming algorithm in the Memory
Manager is hidden (to take some random example), but because of the
skill with which they can evolve the overall architecture of the
product. For every conceivable OS algorithm in Windows, there is some
open-source algorithm floating around that’s just as good. Microsoft’s
competitive advantage is that they can string 10,000 good algorithms
together in such a coherent way that a competitor can’t hope to match
the effort without 30,000 smart programmers of its own.
–
Nick Ryan (MVP for DDK)