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Microsoft Expands Access to Windows Source Code
Brain Stew writes "According to eWeek, MVPs living within thecountries that have signed up with Microsoft's
Windows Source code program can now see it for free (limited source code of course). 'Microsoft Corp. has expanded the Source Licensing Program under which its Most
Valued Professionals get access to the source code for the Windows operating
system. The Redmond, Wash., company said on Monday that all the MVPs within
the Microsoft platforms community and living within the 27 eligible countries
worldwide will now be able to access Windows source code at no cost. '"
Google is your friend
Microsoft MVPs are acknowledged by peers and also by Microsoft for their active participation in Microsoft technical communities around the globe.
So, they're people out in the community volunteering their time by helping people out on forums and through blogs. From my knowledge they have to get nominated and then voted on to acheive their MVP status.
For those wondering, "MVP" is a title bestowed by Microsoft basically to people who help out others in the microsoft.* newsgroups and such. You can find a webpage of a couple of these peope at http://www.mvps.org/.
These aren't Microsoft partner companies or licensee developers by definition, an MVP can well be just some pimply 13 year old that happens to now a whole lot about IIS and shares it with others. As you'd expect there's a lot of emphasis on getting Microsoft applications to work, arcane Internet Explorer settings, scripting, that sort of thing.
These people, for the most part, aren't kernel hackers. If they were, they'd be busy hacking away at *BSD or linux, not figuring out VBA stuff in Excel.
It's hard to see how this will benefit Microsoft directly, in the way of open-ish source. It's not like an elite squad of kernel hackers will be pouring over the source code to find race conditions in inter process communications or something like that. Though perhaps it will help MVPs to explain to others what suitably vague-enough error messages actually mean by looking at the source code that produced it.
(I'm no kernel hacker myself by a long shot, and given the source code to windows I'd.. well.. shrug, I suppose).
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
One of the wonders of closed and proprietary code is that you have the freedom to change certain things with impunity. All of the code that they release will be essentially frozed with all of the bugs in place. One of the very things that has kept MS afloat all this time is the painful process of maintinaing (mostly) adequate backwards compatibility. This has lead to much of the bloat and kruft that is within windows today. It takes much longer to make a breaking change to code that others may be depending on. When you make that code visible, you can almost guarantee that there will be dependencies created.
As seen on Wired: Get a free desktop PC
Have a look through a few issues of Microsoft Systems Journal. I haven't read it recently, but a few years ago you would regularly see article introductions like "You may have been wondering how Microsoft application XX did cool feature YY..." It goes on to document an interface not previously publicly mentioned (and says so).
Therefore, from Microsoft's own press organ, we know that there are interfaces which are used by shipping Windows applications before they're publicly documented. Some of these are later revealed in MSJ, but there's no reason to think that they necessarily reveal all of them. At the very least Microsoft apps have a one-cycle lead time on competitors; at most the competitors never find out.
There is no reason to think the API documents an existing one, although there are very many duplicated interfaces on Windows. It might do something not otherwise possible, or might wrap up several existing functions.
But anyhow: why would there *not* be such an interface? Microsoft never promised they would document every aspect of their systems. Clearly it is in there interests for the OS to help their own applications.
That's exactly the reason why Microsoft offering source code insight to the chinese (or other) government is a joke. As long as they can't compile everything themselves, they can never be sure to have a non-bugged (no pun intended) binary distribution.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
You are aware that not even te GPL requires anonymous people to be given the code, right? That the only requirement is that the code be given to whoever binaries are distributed to. Freely available source is not mandatory.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
In my IE on XP I just get a dark blue screen filling the rendering area.
It's called the native API, and operates at the OS level, much like system calls in linux. It provides functionality for virtual memory, threads, processes, synchronization, files, and so on.
The Win32 API is a wrapper above this API. This is partly because Windows NT was designed to support different APIs. Many functions in the Win32 API have a one-to-one mapping with native functions. This is a good OS design feature, not a secret conspiracy by evil washington overlords.
The native API is important for very low level stuff such as driver development, but is not necessary nor desirable IMO for application development. SQL Server is an application, but many enterprise-level databases have special file access or filesystem level things built in for performance, so I wouldn't be surprised if MS used the native API in SQL Server. But I would be quite surprised if they used it in applications like word or media player.
See, for example, Windows NT/2000 Native API Reference by Gary Nebbett8 701996/104-0340249-2815171?v=glance on amazon
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/157
A good source of info about this topic is sysinternals' article, inside the Native API at http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/info/ntdll.shtml