> whereas Microsoft is actively sabotaging wine

Do you have a link to where I can read more about this? My understanding is that Microsoft saw Wine as inconsequential to their business, even offloading the Mono runtime to them [1] when they dropped support for it.

[1] https://www.mono-project.com/

> Until 2020, Microsoft had not made any public statements about Wine. However, the Windows Update online service will block updates to Microsoft applications running in Wine. On 16 February 2005, Ivan Leo Puoti discovered that Microsoft had started checking the Windows Registry for the Wine configuration key and would block the Windows Update for any component.[125] As Puoti noted: "It's also the first time Microsoft acknowledges the existence of Wine."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software)

This. Windows needs to open source its operating system. End of story.

I doubt it would happen, large projects that aren't open source from the onset and are decades old can have licensed or patented code, Microsoft would have to verify line by line that they can open source it.

Wait long enough and it will happen, the question is just "how long". (Microsoft has open-sourced OS and languages from the 1980s) Some days it seems like Microsoft is more interested in Azure, Copilot and GAME PASS and Windows is an afterthought.

I would certainly love it if Microsoft stopped trying to sell Windows and just open sourced it. I think Windows is a much more pleasant desktop operating system than Linux, minus all the ads and mandatory bloat Microsoft has put in lately. But if Windows was open source the community could just take that out.

I really don't see it happening any time in the next decade at least, though. While Windows might not be Microsoft's biggest focus any more it's still a huge income stream for them. They won't just give that up.

Microsoft seems to be taking a outside-in "component at a time" approach to open sourcing Windows. Terminal, Notepad, Paint, Calculator, the new Edit.com replacement, a lot of WSL now, etc.

This approach has been fascinating so far, but yeah not "exciting" from "what crazy things can I do with Windows like put it in a toaster" side of things.

It would be great to see at least a little bit more "middle-out" from Windows Open Source efforts. A minimal build of the NT Kernel and some core Windows components has been "free as in beer" for a while for hobby projects with small screens if you really want to try a very minimal "toaster build" (there's some interesting RPi out there), but the path to commercialization is rough after that point and the "small screens" thing a bit of a weird line in the sand (though understandable given Microsoft's position of power on the desktop and sort of the tablet but not phone).

The NT Kernel is one of the most interesting microkernels left in active use [0], especially given how many processor architectures it has supported over decades and how many it still supports (even the ones that Windows isn't very commercially successful on today). It could be a wealth of power to research and academia if it were open source, even if Microsoft didn't open source any of the Windows Subsystems. It would be academically interesting to see what sort of cool/weird/strange Subsystems people would build if NT were open source. I suppose Microsoft still fears it would be commercially interesting, too.

[0] Some offense, I suppose to XNU here. Apple's kernel is often called a microkernel for its roots from the Mach kernel, but it has rebuilt some monoliths on top of that over the years (Wikipedia more kindly calls it a "hybrid kernel"), and Mach itself is still so Unix flavored. NT's "object oriented" approach is rather unique today, with its more VMS heritage, a deeply alternate path from POSIX/Unix/Linux(/BSD).