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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. '"
It's pretty clear in my mind that by handing select portions of the source code to "most valuble professionals" that microsoft merely wants to go through the motions of open source, while not being open at all.
And, certainly, this is their right, since it is their source code. However, I don't see many people outside of their "MVP" community (which is who? people stuck working on windows device drivers?) really being interested in doing their busy work for them. And for this reason, because of being unwilling to fully relinquish control, they are going to find themselves unable to fully benefit from openness.
In contrast, IBM fully understands what open source is all about, and manages to deal with the concept in an intelligent manner, instead of trying to make compromises and deal with half measures.
If open source manages to become a signifigant methodology in tomorrow's IT world, IBM seems better equipped to benefit from it, whereas Microsoft is unwilling to do what it takes to prevent sliding off into irrelevence.
However, the problem remains that they really need many more eyes to fix Windows, if that's possible.
Haec merda tauri est. Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
I'm going to recompile Windows optimized for my hardware! It'll blow every other Windows away.
I thought this was already happenning on Kazaa?
10....
9...
8..
Seriously, do you want to be contaminated by having seen Microsofts' source? Always wondering when you'll end up being named in a lawsuit because you may have incorporated some of their worthless IP in a project you're working on?
It could make you unemployable in the future.
Yeah i still have the source code released a while ago in a nice little zip in my emule shared folder.
In that case, you might want to unshare it ASAP. You do realize that your IP can be trivially discovered when you have emule on?
It should be emphasized that having the windows source is much more damaging than beneficial. People are contaminated merely by seeing the source. If you want to learn stuff, there is enough OSS operating systems around that won't make you unemployable if you really catch the kernel bug, or MSFT just finds a good reason to ruin your future.
Just stick to pr0n, music and other binaries.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
Do they get to compile it and run it, or do they have to take Microsoft's word that the binaries that they are running were built from the source that they are seeing?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
If developers want to be sure that the "source" code they're looking at is the actual code their own app calls, can they compile it and link it to the still-secret Microsoft code, then run the whole thing in a debugger?
It's an open secret that Microsoft's own apps, notably SQL-Server, call a "secret Windows API" that isn't documented. That API is said to be faster to code for (time to market) and execute at runtime (performance), giving Microsoft apps advantages in competing with their rivals. Is there a way to use this new code access to discover whether Microsoft apps are calling a "shadow" API, rather than the code made public?
--
make install -not war
"It's a trick. Get an axe."
While at first glance this may seem like a good thing (at least for MS), i'm left wondering whether it will actually do any good...the MVPs who gain this access seem to be part of a rather closed community, being voted to their status by a bunch of people from other peer microsoft communities/groups.
d =fh;EN-US;mvpfaqs
/.?
Take a look at the MVP FAQ: http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?sci
Although some might say that sharing the code out, even among a closed community, might conceivably lead to improvements, from MS's track record with their multifarious products (some of which had oodles of people involved), there is no palpable confidence (at least in my mind) that it will get any better.
And in any case, even though microsoft shares the code out to the MVPs, there is nothing in the article that states that the MVPs will be allowed to modify the code...rather, the article explicitly states that they will "help" the developers. So even if some sagacious MVP does somehow manage to make a tiny improvement (unlikely, i know, but let's just suppose it for the sake of argument), wanna bet that he'd probably have to move heaven and earth to get someone who counts at MS to recognize this?
Also, as someon posted earlier, there is a good chance of the code getting leaked, even if MS uses the strongarm tactics that it is capable of to get the leaks plugged as fast as possible. What would happen then would be anyone's guess...
Anyway, here a link to the Windows 2000 source code http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/text/source.php. (if it's been already posted elsewhere on this site, beg pardon, i did indeed search, so my search skills are lacking...)
Wow, just as i hit SUBMIT earlier slashdot went down...is the big M already guuning for
how about Microsoft try open standards first.
As someone who works for MS in their Mac business unit (that's why I'm anon). I'd like to point out that they're gradually increasing the exposure to selected parts of the Windows source code to people in other departments - us in the Mac unit have had access to the source code for 4 months now, but there's not enough code to compile a working system so it is only of use if you're interested in how certain sections of the OS work (if they happen to be released). So, even as an MS employee we can't get our hands on the whole thing.
Because the source code is not complete and Windows is implemented a lot differently to Linux and MacOS X then some of us in the Mac business unit believe that they'd not care if the source was leaked - in fact a couple of us (me not included) think they actually want this to happen. In a way it makes sense - I mean if a wine developer seen some of the Windows source code (or even *suspected* of seeing it) then MS, in theory, could tie them up for ages with legal action. Personally, I think they'd have to be a lot more desperate to do that as it'd generate a lot of bad publicity for them. So I don't think they'd sue just develop a lot of negative spin around the fact open source people steal other peoples code and ideas.
So, to be safe, anyone who doesn't work at MS should resist the temptation to look at the code even if you're doing so legally. Of course, it's easy for them to point their fingers at open source contributors, but it's harder to track down stolen code in closed source software. I can't say if any GPL code theft goes on at MS (officially we're all warned against it and us Mac developers pride ourselves on writing good quality original code), but it'd be so easy for a lazy programmer to steal some code from Mozilla or Apache and of course we're all free to persue the open code to get ideas from.
Speaking of web browsers we used to have the best web browser for MacOS at one time, until management killed the project (officially the rendering engine is in maintenence mode to support MSN for MacOSX - but there's been little improvments). Personally I use Camino but most in my unit use Safari. Of the people outside my unit most use Firefox under Windows, there's not that many people keen on IE so Firefox has taken a hold here, there's still many people who still use IE here because of loyalty to their employer but we're not officially banned from using alternative browsers so many of us do.
I've actually met a few of the WinIE developers, don't blame them for the stagnant product, until Firefox hit the radar then most of the team were placed on alternative projects. Personally I think they've got their work cut out, IE needs a total rewrite, its last major rewrite was for version 4 - with some of the code dating back even further (check the about box if you run windows).
Authorities are puzzled when software developers in 27 different nations are found stark raving mad, having clawed their eyeballs out.
IBM has made it clear, in my mind at least, that where they embrace free source software, they do so because they don't have to maintain it, that it levels the playing field and makes their fancy service the important part, that customers are not locked into them and they are not locked into proprietary software maintenance.
That pretty much sums up why I like free source software. I can hack it if I want, or pay someone else to hack it, I get updates free from everybody else working on it, and I don't get locked into proprietary schemes which may or may not go out of business or change their update policies. My data will always be accessible to me, because the programs that access it are free source, and I can look at them and change them any way I want, any time I want, now and forever.
Infuriate left and right
I sort of get the feeling that Microsoft is releasing source code to some so that they could eventually attempt to do what SCO is doing. UNIX may have no trade secrets left, but Windows certainly does.
"within the 27 eligible countries worldwide "
That is 28 if you count eDonkey as a country.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Actually, no. I don't think the solution is to have a handful of experienced eyes - I am sure there are Windows programmers who are pretty top-notch. What is essential is having the power and ability to FIX problems. I am sure that MS is like most places, where the project ships with bugs. After that, someone else maintains the code and the original person moves on to more exciting things. Or there is no time to fix all that "security" stuff. Or their hands are tied because in order to fix that "security stuff" they would have to break some kind of whiz-bang lock-in interoperability. Or any of a thousand other reasons.
In OSS code, if it doesn't get fixed it is because the owner is lazy, or because the fix isn't deemed good enough, or it isn't seen as a high-priority. Or any of a thousand other reasons.
The more eyes you have on the product, the more likely you are to find problems. Experts will find the "expert" problems in architecture and whatnot, and the "user" eyes will find all kinds of things that the experts might not care about.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
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
In contrast, IBM fully understands what open source is all about ...
IBM, like Apple, understands open source. It is a vehicle to sell their hardware. In contrast, Microsoft is a software company.
One of the few good things about closed source is that if a vendor wants third-party developers to write to its closed-source OS, it is beneficial to the vendor to create and make available well-written, accurate, complete, up-to-date documentation.
Admittedly Microsoft's documentation for developers has been going downhill lately, along with almost everyone else's. The physical volumes became CD's which became help-system files which became scraps of sample code. In order to develop to the Windows SCSI API, it is necessary to use guesswork, intuition, trial-and-error, and the assistance of the Windows community's "tribal knowledge." The PC community has long been used to using magazine articles and "Undocumented WIndows" books as sources of information.
But it is now about to get worse. I potentially foresee a situation where favored developers have access to source code, and documentation will decline to the point where it is difficult or impossible for non-favored developers to work in any development environment but VB.
In the Apple world, documentation was absolutely superb from about 1983 to about 2000 and underwent a precipitous decline with the advent of Darwin-based OS X. (A noticeable portion of the official documentation seems to have been generated automatically from header files!) I don't think this is a coincidence.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
How was this "secret" API call discovered since people don't have the source code to SQL Server.
The same way vulnerabilities or hidden features are discovered without the source code: you can always look at the disassembly, and there are plenty of powerful code analysis tools that don't need (or benefit) from the source code.
Why wouldn't this be proferred to those with MCSE credentials or MSDN subscriptions -- y'know, those guys who pay to know all this stuff?
I'm a Microsoft MVP - I'm also an MCSE and have an MSDN Universal subscription ;-)
I've questioned WPA on Microsoft's campus in front of 600 other MVPs. My specific question was since WPA pretty much guarantees paid licenses and since the price of piracy was *already* built into Windows I asked whether MS was going to lower the price of Windows since sales on previously pirated copies of Windows were pure profit - development, marketing and distribution costs were factored into the price of Windows before WinXP ever came out.
I'm not going to dispute their interpretation of the EULA because they wrote the software and can license it any way they like.
And you're right - the quality of MVP answers varies widely, but if the MVP has any sense at all he'll STFU about stuff where his skills aren't strong - I know I've been corrected by both MVPs and newsgroup users a couple times in the past two or three years.
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
Yes, Microsoft has created an initiative whose sole purpose is to hopefully inject proprietary code into an OSS project somewhere down the line in order to sue them.
And people wonder why Slashdot is considered a poor source of fringe journalism.
...at MFC, the source shipped with Visual Studio for years.
;).) Sometimes end user features bury the desire for elegant (or even functional sometimes) architecture...
Ugly, ugly, ridiculously poor code documentation (if any), odd workarounds left-over from the days of WIN32s, 16-bit thunking days, et cetera...
Be GLAD that you don't have access to the Windows source, god forbid anyone should code that way (of course, there's plenty of Open Source Software that is just as ugly or worse
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... when you can visit some russian hacker sites and download it there ? :-)
(And grab a copy of the Half Life 2 source with it
Though they do sell some hardware, what IBM is really about is services. The secret that nobody else seems able to figure out about the benefit of using OSS is this - with other services or contracts, you produce the code and then when you are done that code all goes to the company you did the work for.
Using OSS, they can improve frameworks devoted to services, and also benefit from others working on said frameworks as well - making thier service work even more effective, a virtuious cycle.
I've seen some other consulting companies with thier own frameworks. But they've always been hack jobs, because they were no open and therefore had too few people to really do a good job on them.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
In my IE on XP I just get a dark blue screen filling the rendering area.