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.