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Microsoft Agrees to License Windows Source Code
msbmsb writes "Stepping away from previous tradition, "Microsoft Corp. said Wednesday it will license its Windows source code to comply with a European Union antitrust ruling." But in an effort to stop the cloning of the OS, developers will still have to pay an unspecified amount for the code. This is an addition to the "12,000 pages of technical documents and 500 hours of free technical support" to those who purchase a license."
I'll admit it, I'm shocked. However, I have to ask the question? What is this going to change?
Once this hits pirate land, are we in for more trouble than good?
With the actual source and another pair of eyes looking at it, there should be more security fixes and hopefully a more secure OS.
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The question is will it be complete and compile? Don't they have to hide parts of Windows that are licensed from other companies?
Windows will still be distributed as binaries, having this source code does not give any guarantee about what's really running on your system.
Ever been annoyed at having to keep a FAT32 neutral-zone on your dual boot system because nobody's yet worked out how to write to NTFS without wrecking everything?
That's the kind of thing this will hopefully lead to. It's all about interoperability. Unfortunately, knowing MS, the terms and conditions will be fricking deadly, and no open-source coder will so much as look at MS code for fear of contaminating themselves legally, so we shouldn't get too optimistic...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Actually, Microsoft is already licensing the Windows source code. However the significance of the new event is, they will not be choosing the licensor (at least not as much as before).
i censing/default.mspx. You'll see that the top item mentions "access to Microsoft Windows® source code for internal development and support purpose". And as far as I know there are already many utility producers (Symantec, WinInternals, etc) that can access NTFS source codes.
For a list of microsoft shared source licencing programs look at http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/L
Anyways do not keep your hopes too high. As you can see there are many shared source licenses (some are even like BSD), however Windows is not becoming "Open Source" soon.
So MS get ordered to hand over documentation for their protocols. They do so. It's crap and they're ordered to go back and do it properly.
So they respond with "figure it out yourself. After paying us some cash obviously."
Does anyone actually think this is an acceptable response?
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
I honestly do not believe a company should be forced to opening up secrets to competitors. Does this mean the competitors will open their source code up, so Microsoft can see theirs too? Seems like a fair deal to me. If Microsoft does open the source...I would be willing to bet there would be a plague of new exploits found...which is both good and bad. Good in the sense they will be patched w00t! Bad in the sense...until they are patched, its going to be a hell of time for us IT Admins :( To put this into perspective...Coca Cola has their own secret formula to making Coke, does that mean they will have to open their formula up to Pepsi? Just some food for thought...
Are you well? I'm British, but I can't help but notice that Germany IS THE WORLD'S LARGEST EXPORTER OF MANUFACTURED GOODS. Bigger than the USA (world's largest economy), bigger than China (world's largest country), bigger than Japan. The fact that Germans make more stuff than Britain I can cope with (they're bigger than us, after all) but the fact that they beat both the US and Japan is amazing. Who gives a shit if Britain MIGHT have lower unemployment (can you trust the UK unemployment numbers???).
That's why Britain's economy outshines all of Europe's.
Really? On what basis? In terms of pure GDP, Germany is larger. If you prefer GDP per capital I believe Ireland and Norway beat the UK. If you want to talk about salaries I believe three or four countries rank higher. If you want to talk about standard of living about ten European countries rank higher than the UK (according to the Economist, a UK publication). If you want to talk about growth then quite a number of countries rank higher.
I'm not saying that the UK economy is not good, it is, but it is unfortunately common to come across people who think like you in Britain.
And what would the UK economy be like if it wasn't so tied to the USA? Why do you think Blair is Bush's bitch? Read up on the USA economically punishing the UK for its lack of participation in the Vietnam war if you want a taste of what the UK economy would be like if it didn't have the support of the USA...
how are they abusing a monopoly that was generated by the successful marketting of their product? For the sake of arguement here, if I were to develop a very successful product and some company wanted to build a competing product that worked just like mine; I wouldn't want to be forced to provide the designs to that other company and reduce THEIR R&D costs. I already paid mine. There's nothing out there that says interoperability with Windows is a requirement. If their product is so great, it should be able to shine on it's own. When did we start calling "momentum" a monopoly? Yes I realize the courts have justified all this; I still don't have to agree with it. MS is bad enough on it's own without our having to help them out.
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Yes but being illegal if its leaked doesn't stop you from downloading Microsoft Office or Windows off your favorite P2P network / torrent site / usenet ....
However this does bring up a more legite question: "Will Apple have to do the same?" or since darwin is already open source does it matter?
They would have to prove you copied it. If you were stupid enough to cut and paste their block of code into yours, you will get done. If not, say you already had some code written and just needed to know a few things, you could tweak your code according to what actually happens in the protocol, rather than what microsoft has documented incorrectly. There is a catch, which I will get to below.
We need proper documentation not source code, if something is broken we can point to the manual and have it corrected
Why would microsoft ever do such a thing? Why would MS ever release real documentation?
instead of following the broken implementation in the source only to find it "fixed" in another version of the os and breaking compatibility
Compatibility is a two-edged sword. If they break compatibility, it hurts their users too. Some of them might care, and some of them might be big enough to demand a fix. If Microsoft have to release their updatd source code then that's a win for everyone except microsoft.
Where this might fall down is if MS cheat, and instead of releasing current code release something a few years old and broken, something I believe has already happened once...
Anyway, on to the catch, this from the samba developer's page:
Work like no one is watching. Dance like you've never been hurt. Make love like you don't need the money.
If thats a question, you obviously have no idea exactly just how crooked these figures are. We do all kinds of idiotic things to get the results that get the baby-kissers re-elected:
And all these measures generally remove quite alot of people who are generally included in the fiigures quoted for other countries. Also, if references another countries figures in relation to ours, they will normally pick the worst figures they can find. Generally, they can normally get away with picking figures that are up to 5 years old (the obviously pick the highest) and the ones that include all kinds of weird crap (ie, if there are a set of figures that will factor in an estimate for people that have probably been missed, they will use those).
UK unemployment figures are wildly inaccurate, and i don't think other countries fudge the figures to the extent we do.
My understanding is that previous disclosures of Windows Source typically had "no develop" and "no commercial spinoff" clauses. I.e. you couldn't necessarily use the Windows source to try and make your pay-ware version of $whatever work better.
I think this changes that. Now software companies working on plugsin/whatever for windows will be able to continue working on those things, even after looking at the windows code.
That is a pretty significant change, I think. Previous source offerings were primarily for academic institutions, govt code/assurance audits.
I suppose there have been a few previous Windows source licenses that allowed for product development. Sysinternals, Mainwin, and OpenNT come to mind.. but perhaps these were all US based entities?
Note - i have no specific knowledge of these issues, i am just stating my impression.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
You can do that now because of the anti-trust trial, but it doesn't matter because 10 years ago, Microsoft made sure you couldn't do that. This created a monopoly, and all the applications became dependent on the Windows platform, which made the monopoly huge, and competing offerings irrelevant. In other words, you can do that now because competitors are so irrelevant in the face of the monopoly, which was made so huge by preventing those competitors from competing in the first place.
"Sufferin' succotash."
What if the Windows clone has fewer bugs, fewer security flaws, runs faster, and is a better quality than Microsoft Windows and sells for a lower price? Can they sell it outside of Europe then?
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I have the feeling that this product is more and more moving away from the realm of products and into the realm of neccesities. Sooner or later people will want to create products that have the same API as windows (essentialy windows clones). So far they ae not able because M$ is potentialy able to stop them, but when we are talking about an OS that has >90% share, will they be able to keep it up? AT&T had monopoly and lost it also.
Not really, for groups that have to be compatible with Win32 then the specification often is the source code. The official specs are already on MSDN and of course sometimes this just isn't enough, because you need to replicate things that aren't actually in the specs for applications to work. Just go browse the Wine sources for a while looking for comments of the form "MSDN says X, but Windows does Y". Then there's stuff like DCOM that's so convoluted that even after reading all of MSDN (the "specs"), and several books written by MS employees, how it actually works is still obscure.
Long ago Digital used to provide the source for VMS on Microfiche so that they could comply with government and business security requirements without really giving up control over their OS crown jewels. Looks like this is a similar move by MS. It's similar to a the legal strategy of information overload - dumping tens of thousands of irrelevant documents into the hands of the opposition to force them to waste time and resources looking for that needle hidden in the proverbial haystack.