Why MS is Not Opening More Source Code

mario_grgic writes "Apparently inappropriate code comments is one of the reasons according to this story. I wonder what kind of things developers put in comments that would be so bad for the rest of us to see?"

Comments

Most Common Inappropriate Comment

[flargleblarg]

God, I fucking hate working for Bill Gates!

Re:Best of the 'inappropiate comments'

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, for those few parts of Windows which actually work as advertised, Bill's concern may be:

// This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
// modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
// as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
// of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Antitrust is the reason

[NoSuchGuy]

because the comments would look like:

/* This function call to kill Calderas DOS */
.........

/* Optimize handshake so 3rd party products have more connection losses */
..........

/* from the Burst.com code to optimize streaming */
...........

Comments in the code

[starrsoft]

1. Insert some comment that makes Microsoft look evil and incompetent and makes OSS look good
2. Use C++ style comments /* */ instead of VB style comments '
3. ??????
4. Profit in karma!

What They're Worried About

[BinBoy]

I wonder what kind of things developers put in comments that would be so bad for the rest of us to see?"

From the article: See, in order for us to ship the code we need to "scrub" the comments and make sure there is nothing bad in there. No swear words, no bad jokes on the part of developers, no references to specfiic customers, no geo-political faux pas.

Early Unix Kernel

[rlp]

I recall seeing in the early Unix kernel a comment on a particularly hairy piece of code:

/* You are not meant to understand this */

Also, several comments to the effect that a particular piece of code was a kludge.

Karma whoring

[Cmdr TECO]

You are not expected to understand this.