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Taiwan Asks Microsoft To Open Windows Source
Andy Tai writes "According to this China Times article (in Chinese), the Republic of China government has asked Microsoft to open Windows source code. The official, Lin Jua-Cheng, in charge of the 'e-government' initiative, says many other countries have also sent similar requests to Microsoft. Lin explains that without Windows source code, the government cannot add custom firewall functionalities to Windows based systems in wide use, and that is very bad for the information security of Taiwan. Microsoft refused to publicly release the source in the past using reasons of copyright protection, but Lin emphasizes this request is reasonable since it is based on (government users') necessity." Read on for a bit more, too. (Can anyone suggest an online Chinese English translation engine that produces other than gibberish?)
Andy continues "Lin points out that GNU/Linux systems, because of their freeness and high security (due to the availability of the source code, which can be modified to add firewalls and other security measures), have become widely used in government computer systems (especially in militaries and intelligence agencies) of many nations and the Pentagon, the FAA, and the air force of the U.S. Lin says the government cannot rely on a single vendor, and to promote the alternatives, the government has set up a 'Free (libre) Software Steering Committee' directing government efforts. The two aims of the ROC government's current software policy is making Windows source code openly available and the development of Free (libre) Software in Taiwan."
Open Sherlock 3 under Mac OS X 10.2.
Click once on the Translation channel in the Toolbar.
Copy and paste the Chinese text within the top half and make sure you have the "Chinese (Simplified) to English" filter selected.
Then click the Translate button.
If you ask me, this request is quite lame. Microsoft has created a product, and the government of China can use it if they so desire. If they need it to create a firewall-type software package for their machines, why not ask Microsoft to create that instead? Something just seems overly fishy here. Besides, an external firewall would most likely provide better control and better performance for all users.
> You have to trust someone at some point.
Of course, but you'll find people want to trust groups of people more than one person.
If _everybody_ is using a compiler, you can trust it. (or trust that if there is a backdoor, _everybody_ has the backdoor, so you're still on a level playing field.)
But not _everybody_ is using windows to install custom firewalls. The trust can't come from a wide community of users, so it has to come from examining the actual construction of the product itself.
People don't trust a company nearly as much as they trust groups of people who should have already encountered the problems youre attempting to avoid should a problem in the product exist. Since that is impossible (or at least difficult) with respect to Windows as a custom firewall platform, because of the lower visibility of use and the lesser amount of people using it in this fasion, I'd realize I had no groups of users to trust and this I'd only trust the innards of the product once I could examine them myself.
"Old man yells at systemd"
This was a publicity stunt from someone who wanted to plug Linux. There are thousands of source licensees for Windows, and I wager the government of Taiwan is one of them. Maybe this person's particular firewall project didn't get a source license -- not to mention how it didn't need one, as MS's network stack is absolutely pluggable and documented in the SDK -- but this doesn't immediately translate into a mandate for MS to give the code away and satisfy one person who could easily vote with his feet and use FreeBSD+netgraph, OpenBSD+ipf, or Linux.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
I think it would be great if the end result of this was the Taiwanese government deciding to switch to Linux. The money they would save on future licenses could be better spent on furthering development of the tools that they need, if they aren't already available to them with Linux, and since the underlying code is open source, that problem is eliminated. Seems like a win-win situation for the Taiwanese government and Linux users world wide.
I don't think this will happen though. More likely MS will do the minimum that it needs to do to keep Taiwan happy. The source code will never be open, but they may add some features or create a firewall that will fill the need. They may even end up profiting off of this. They can tell Taiwan that they will do it for Taiwan, instead of the Taiwanese government using it's own programmers whom would not be familiar with the source code. Who better to modify Windows than the people that work on Windows day in and day out?
Maybe someone high up in the Linux community should step up and make an offer to the Taiwanese government. Maybe make them a package deal that would include training their IT people on how to properly install, configure, and maintain Linux as well as training some of them to be able to teach others how to use the new software.
How is it that one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?
Oh, sure. Well, sort of. Microsoft will probably work with select
partners to ensure that this need is met within a trusted computing
architecture via the shared source initiative, or somesuch. (When
translated into English, this rougly means they'll allow half a
dozen NDA-bound persons from the government in question to peek for
a couple of minutes at copies of what they claim is the requested
source code, with strict provisions in place to ensure no useful
information ever comes of it to anyone. The government of Taiwan
will be pacified by this just enough that nothing more interesting
will come of the matter.)
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
"Why the hell should I be forced into forking over more cash when I can just do the goddamn work myself."
This breaks your entire rant right there. If you were getting more value for doing the work yourself, you would've already chosen that path. By saying that the money spent is a smaller cost than the personal time needed to master the concepts and develop the software, you are making an economic decision. The type that drives forward the economy. Why eat out when you can cook at home? Why buy carrots from a store when you can grow them yourself?
You have to specialize at some point, otherwise you'll end up being a person who is ok or decent at many menial tasks, while not really enjoying the benefits modern society has to offer. If you're whinning about how expensive something is when you can do it yourself, you're only trying to distract us from the fact that you haven't done it yourself! Actions do speak louder than whines.
Before you whine about trust, you should understand the economic underpinnings of these decisions. Since software is digital, the cost is all in the creation phase. You should tell your government to look in to escrow software development. Have a fixed dollar value attached to projects + the condition that it be GPLed upon release, then drum up the funding for it. Some company wanting to make money will invest time in it to reap the money returns, and the government gets software that it can again set contracts on ("we now need to to collate documents. We'll give $4,000 to anyone who gives us this feature").
You could take the alternate route that customers enter in to a limited-trust scenario. Complete access to source code, provided they do not provide it to anyone else. This lets clients pick over everything, while keeping the accountability that would allow a traditional software company to continue to sell the software + support to other people until the escrow method becomes more popular.
If today's software companies were to just give away everything as you state, they'd die. When you develop some great algorithm that suites a problem, you've done the work. When someone else comes along and copies it, you have no way of recouping the cost of the work because the copy cost is 0. Without some sort of escrowed payment system and trusted-client relationship for these innovations, software development would mostly grind to a halt.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Just another link in the chain to break down my friend. Maybe they don't want to have to run 50 different programs on their computers to do what they want. Maybe they think that running 50 different programs is a bit insecure. Maybe they want it all in one tight little well-tested box of a program that they easily distribute to their millions of computers around the country. That strikes me as needing the source-code to do...but that's just me ;)
... I think I'm going to have to say "fat chance". I don't believe that MS will reverse its stance on security-through-obscurity... not even at the request of a nation.
At least they're taking the first small step. At least they're politely asking for the source code, which is more than any other country has tried.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our American dead!
Sources? I think you're referring to the amendments of '91, but if so, I think you're way off, I don't remember them disclaiming the mainland and I know, in fact, they specifically added provisions for representation of mainland residents in the ROC.
In principle they have, that's what one china two systems means. In practice they're less than happy with that, of course, not the least because ROC officials are so obviously working to Helsinkify Taiwan and return it to it's state as a vassal of Japan instead. And A-bians title in quotes is hardly limited to the mainland - you must admit, the circumstances of his election are suspicious, to say the least.
Two points, first that's not a very good analogy at all, I was consciously avoiding it, because the Confederacy never claimed any authority over the rest of the US , and second because Cuba was never part of the US. Taiwan was ruled by Japan through the end of WWII, yes, but then again, for most of that time so was Manchuria, ("Manchuguo" ring a bell?) what's your point? Taiwan has been part of China for centuries, and a few years of occupation doesn't exactly change that.
If they were belligerent they would have hit something with them. Or hit someone, somewhere, outside of China maybe? Let's see, there was the dustup with India, and they intervened at the very last minute to prevent North Korea from becoming a US stronghold, but other than that I can't think of any instances of belligerence from the PRC. They tend to stick to terrorising people inside China, which is bad, and I'm not condoning it, but belligerence implies terrorising people distant from your own borders, and I just don't see that in the PRC.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
No, if the people at WINE (WINE Is Not An Emulator) could see all the windows APIs then they could implement them.