LawMeme LawMeme Yale Law School  
LawMeme
Search LawMeme [ Advanced Search ]
 
 
 
 
Microsoft Reveals its Code
Posted by Paul Szynol on Wednesday, January 15 @ 18:03:54 EST OpenSource
So that governments may for themselves decide the security merits of Windows, the company will reveal its source code to government agencies tempted to use open source software instead.
"It's a brilliant maneuver," said Michael Gartenberg, research director for Jupiter Research. "It gives them a huge (public relations) win, gives them a response back to the open-source folks and also provides the impetus that many of the government organizations have been looking for to continue doing business with them."
If and only if the code passes the test. The move may be a disaster if government officials around the world conclude that Microsoft's code is not what they're looking for.

It's also not clear exactly how much of the code will become open to official scrutiny. One of the advantages of Linux is the ability for any one developer to analyze the code in its entirety, and thus understand fully the interactions between its components. A limited view of Windows code might yield results that have only limited accuracy and relevance.

 
Related Links
· More about OpenSource
· News by Paul Szynol


Most read story about OpenSource:
New Democrats: No Gov't $ to GPL Projects

Options

 Printer Friendly Page  Printer Friendly Page

 Send to a Friend  Send to a Friend

Threshold
  
The comments are owned by the poster. We aren't responsible for their content.

Re: Microsoft Reveals its Code (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Wednesday, January 15 @ 23:11:58 EST
I've heard(no way of confirming it, until MS releases the actual license agreement for this) that it will be a limited and strict license, not unlike the existing shared source license scheme MS employs on some projects.

In other words there will likely be some nasty restrictions.


[ Reply to This ]


Leges humanae nascuntur, vivunt, moriuntur
Human laws are born, live, and die

Contributors retain copyright interests in all stories, comments and submissions.
Everything else copyright (c) 2002 by the Information Society Project.

This material may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions
set forth in the Open Publication License, v1.0 or later.
The latest version is currently available at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/.

You can syndicate our news with backend.php

Page Generation: 0.198 Seconds