Microsoft has changed a great deal over the years - from launching its own devices to its new cross-platform strategy of making its software as widely available as possible. But if you were in any doubt of the company's changing attitudes, consider the comments made by its Technical Fellow, Mark Russinovich. In an interview published today by WIRED, Russinovich said that open sourcing its Windows operating system is "definitely possible". Indeed, he added that Microsoft has already discussed and considered the possibility: "Every conversation you can imagine about what [we] should do with our software - open versus non-open versus services - has happened."

The chances of this actually happening any time soon, if at all, are somewhat small - and not just because of the considerable loss of revenue that would hit Microsoft by making the Windows code base openly available, free of charge. As Russinovich pointed out, there's also the issue of complexity to consider. "If you open source something," he said, "but it comes with a build system that takes rocket scientists and three months to set up, what's the point?"