Are forces set in motion today to ensure that in the future there is but one Operating System?
Microsoft is slowly getting people off Win32 and onto .Net CLR managed code. They very cleverly made the CLR an open standard. So you can develop a project like Mono and run a .Net application on Linux or Windows. Windows has never been a truly secure OS. Could there be a “Mono-like” effort in Redmond to port the Windows GUI to BSD?
The two big window managers for Linux, Gnome and KDE are preparing to merge into one free GUI.
Apple’s flagship OS is basically a proprietary GUI on BSD Unix. They are moving to the x86 CPU architecture. Nothing would stop you from eventually running a Apple window manager or a Microsoft window manager on a BSD or Linux OS core.
Is it too hard to think of a future where there is one OS core be it Linux or BSD and your choice of kernel modules that support proprietary GUI window managers from either Windows or Apple?
KNOME GUI –> CLR –> Linux (Free Computing)
Mac GUI –> CLR –> Linux/BSD (Proprietary Option #1)
Windows GUI –> CLR –> Linux/BSD (Proprietary Option #2)
Each “version” of a computer would have it’s own best features but down where it counts they all talk the same IO language. Something to think about.
I too believe this could very well be Microsoft’s future– As you know, since I suggested it. But you failed to mention the importants of the vista pit stop. By building vista, Microsoft “forces” developers to start working in .net. Once developers become very good at it and most of the windows based apps are built on or around it, it won’t be hard for users to migrate to a linux OS and a Windows GUI with a CLR backend. Furthermore, users couldn’t go to other GUIs because of the propritary windows UI APIs that app makers would build in. Even “legacy” apps built today using .net would be support, but couldn’t be since projects like mono will have a hard time keeping up with specialized APIs Microsoft builds for there front end.
One last thing I could imagine that we didn’t talk about. Since open source means you can just take the code and edit it for your needs, it seems likely Microsoft would start there own branch from BSD/Linux?