Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Discloses 14,000 Pages of Coding Secrets
OrochimaruVoldemort writes "In an unexpected move, Microsoft has disclosed 14,000 pages of coding secrets. According to The Register: 'This is Microsoft's latest effort to satisfy anti-trust concerns of the European Union, which is possibly a tougher adversary for the company than Google.' The article mentioned that this will be done in three phases. 'Between now and June it will garner feedback from the developer community. Then, at the end of June, Microsoft will publish the final versions of technical documentation — along with definitive patent licensing terms.' Lets just hope those terms are pro open source."
Unexpected, as in they told us very loudly that they were going to do it?
I have to admit I'm tempted to be interested in the Exchange stuff. The
company I work for uses it. As with most MS products it's not, um, horrible,
when it's working but it's a PITA to troubleshoot problems. The MAPI Tool for
looking at the "innards" is horrible. Maybe this documentation will at least
spawn some better third party management tools that I can convince my employer
to buy.
For now most pages (all?) are prefaced with: [This topic is preliminary documentation and is subject to change in future documentation releases.] I haven't had a chance to search out legalese to answer the summary's question on open source friendlyness.
I figure a "hope-for-the-best-expect-the-worst" attitude is the best way to approach this one...
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
the pages had for now was a bunch of disclaimers. Turns out this is just the
first page of each document. I, for the life of me, could not see a way to go to
the next page. The side table of contents doesn't work either.
But every doc is available as a PDF and you can grab whole sections in zip files.
I found it interesting that they chose a cross platform format like PDF and
didn't try to shove Word Docs at the world or their MDI(?) format, their supposed
PDF killer.
Anyway the legalese is vague and scary for now... Intellectual Property Rights Notice for Protocol Documentation
Copyrights. This protocol documentation is covered by Microsoft copyrights.
Regardless of any other terms that are contained in the terms of use for the
Microsoft website that hosts this documentation, you may make copies of it in
order to develop implementations of the protocols, and may distribute portions
of it in your implementations of the protocols or your documentation as
necessary to properly document the implementation. This permission also
applies to any documents that are referenced in the protocol documentation.
No Trade Secrets. Microsoft does not claim any trade secret rights in this
documentation.
* Patents. Microsoft has patents that may cover your implementations of the
protocols. Neither this notice nor Microsoft's delivery of the documentation
grants any licenses under those or any other Microsoft patents. However, the
protocols may be covered by Microsoftâ(TM)s Open Specification Promise (available
here: http://www.microsoft.com/interop/osp). If you would prefer a written
license, or if the protocols are not covered by the OSP, patent licenses are
available by contacting protocol@microsoft.com.
Trademarks. The names of companies and products contained in this
documentation may be covered by trademarks or similar intellectual property
rights. This notice does not grant any licenses under those rights.
Reservation of Rights. All other rights are reserved, and this notice does not
grant any rights other than specifically described above, whether by
implication, estoppel, or otherwise. * emphaisis mine
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
The plural of virus is viruses.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
The M$ Word viewer can be downloaded for free, which might actually be useful if you happen to be a Windows user.
MS has NEVER done anything yet that is pro open source.
What about the 700 CSS testcases they recently contributed to the W3C under the BSD license? Or any of their other releases under OSI-approved licenses, for example WIX? Are you seriously going to argue that releasing things under open-source licenses is not pro-open-source?
Most important part of this article:
In addition, Microsoft will release some 30,000 pages of documentation surrounding Windows client and server protocols.
Note: WILL not "HAS" and/or not "Will sometime soon". They could be delaying this just long enough to figure out how to break all the protocols on the new OS/on the next service pack.
I'm not sure that's correct. If you are only talking self-replicating viruses that spread to continue replication, you may be correct. However,the appearance of rootkit anchored malware "in the wild" closely followed that release which made the information widely available outside limited academic and security research circles. The first rootkit was published as far back as 1999 by Greg Hoglund, founder of rootkit.com. There was a lot of academic interest and discussion in rootkit development specifically on Windows NT based systems before that time but almost none had been detected "in the wild". But rootkit anchored, serious malware infections have ballooned are now "professionally" developed for criminal purposes and used as the base for most, if not all, of the botnets. The release of the Windows 2000 source code certainly removed the need for extensive reverse engineering.
The Windows 2000 source code leak dates back to 2004 http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39146176,00.htm
Hackerdefender was also coincidently released early in 2004 by holy father
One of the most frequently encountered is Hacker Defender, created by an Eastern European who calls himself Holy Father. The latest free version was published early in 2004 and, more recently, premium and customized versions of this malware became available for a fee. http://searchwindowssecurity.techtarget.com/news/column/0,294698,sid45_gci1112754,00.html
No, it just means that the code when you get it has to be open or you can ask for it. Think of Red Hat, RHEL is open source yet they still make money off of it. Open source != freeware, you can make money off of open source as Red Hat and other companies have shown. Had MS not been a monopoly they would have to be much more open then they are now.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
I know (hope) you were trying to be funny, but you can read MS Office documents without owning Office, and have been able to for at least 8 years or so:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=3657ce88-7cfa-457a-9aec-f4f827f20cac&displaylang=en
I can think of an entire website, which is linked from Microsoft's open source website open source page link.
Whether they contribute much (if anything) is another question entirely.
Microsoft does keep a FUD campaign about OSS being hard to use, a toy, lacking support, worse than equivalent commercial software, etc., some of which is true and some just plain smear.
I can smear Vista as well:
Vista wipes hard drives and drags your machine to a crawl. The first is a fact, at least for me - Vista automatic update left my machine in an unbootable state during the pre-SR1 patch and I had to erase my drive with an image to get it to work again. The second is smear - running OpenGL on Vista in a window is incredibly slow, but I'm applying it to the entire OS just like they do in some of their comparisons.
Keep in mind here that I don't hate MS, I hate MS's business practices (heck, I hate most business practices, but they're rich and I'm a peon, so who am I to talk?).