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."

Comments

Lame

[PtM2300]

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.

Re:don't beleive the hype...

[SirSlud]

> 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.

This is ridiculous

[scrytch]

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.

Forced? I don't see a gun at your head.

[Inoshiro]

"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.