Microsoft To Share Office Source Code

I_Love_Pocky! writes "According to this article, Microsoft is going to give its source code for Office 2003 to more than 30 different world governments. The purpose? So they can inspect the code for security flaws."

Comments

I'm wondering...

[leonmergen]

Not only security is the purpose of making it available, but also so that governments can adapt file formats for cross-software compatibility. Now I'm wondering, what will happen if a government wants to adapt this document format to some opensource program, which happen to have a license that requires to donate all adjustments to the code to the opensource community... I'm pretty sure Microsoft will not allow this, will it ?

Jesus

[gowen]

And exactly how many of those governments are going to waste their taxpayers money debugging the code for MS, when the license under which they've seen the code, doesn't allow them to do anything with it?

<TIN FOIL HAT>
and what happens when the members of a gov IT team that's licensed this code, then want to use and contribute to an Open Source project that better suits their needs -- hey! they can't! You've signed a prescriptive NDA!

Re:Jesus

[Angostura]

Precisely. It strikes me that in most cases this program will just be used to fill in the right check box on a tick list. "We can look at the source code if we want to" . Good. Next.

I doubt there will be much real examination going on.

There are numerous benefits to be gained by a programmer who examines real open source code. They can implement new features, squash bugs, tweak functionality - and potentially learn programming techniques.

The potential return on investment in time is great.

By comparison, the return on investment of examining MS code is small both to the organisation, and to the individual programmer - there is little or nothing that can be *done* with the knowledge gained. In fact the tainting issue referenced by others can even have a chilling effect on the use of *existing* knowledge.

Don't Look

[suezz]

If anybody develops for OpenOffice or any other office suite I would not even get in the same room as the code. If you look at the code and develop for OpenOffice then Microsoft will probably come after you saying you stolen their code because you read it and it gave you the ideas and means to do the programming. Be very, very, very careful - why would a proprietary company want people to see it's secrets that has been its cash cow for the past 4 or five years. I think they are gearing up for an attack on open office - now that we have seen part of the agreement between sun and them - why would open office even have to be mentioned in the agreement - it has nothing to do with them. I smell something rotten in denmark.

Re:Interesting

[ajp]

If this were true then not one person who previously worked at Microsoft would ever be able to work anywhere else. Rob Glaser, for example, who left Microsoft's media division to open up Real Audio.

Thank you. Next?

MS Office loses an argument against OSS

[roesti]

Hang on a second. I thought that even if you let other people review your source code, they're highly unlikely to do so. Isn't that one of the arguments that the anti-OSS crowd march out all the time? Now, Microsoft are doing it, and they're telling people it's for security purposes. Aren't they conceding that this argument is flawed, if they themselves can see some merit in doing so?

Coming up in the news, Microsoft will announce it will start making good design choices, writing good documentation, publishing their binary file formats, and giving away their flagship software for free. For the government. Foreign ones, even. Probably.