As a thought experiment: what do we all suppose would be the impact to Microsoft if they deliberately made public the proprietary source code for all of their publicly available commercial products and efforts (including licensed software, services; excluding private contracts, research), but the rest of their intellectual property and trade secrets remained private?

Since I’m posing the question, here’s my guess:

- Their stock would take at least a short term hit because it’s an unconventional and uncharacteristic move

- The code would reveal more about their strategic interests to competitors than they’d like, but probably nothing revelatory

- It might confirm or reinforce some negative perceptions of their business practices

- It might dispel some too

- It may reduce some competitive advantage amongst enormous businesses, and may elevate some very large firms to potential competitors

- It would provide little to no new advantage to smaller players who aren’t already in reach of competing with them and/or don’t have the resources to capitalize on access to the code

- It would probably significantly improve public perception of the company and its future intentions, at least among developers and the broader tech community

In other words, a wash. Overall business impact would be roughly neutral. The code has more strategic than technical value, there are few who could leverage the technical value that is any kind of revenue center with growth potential. Any disadvantage would be negated by the public image goodwill it generated.

Maybe my take is naive though! Maybe it would really hurt Microsoft long term if suddenly everyone can fork Windows 11, or steal ideas for their idiosyncratic office suite, or get really clever about how to get funded to go head to head with Azure armed with code everyone else can access too.