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Microsoft Finally Open Sources Windows 7 Tool
Jan writes "Microsoft has
open sourced the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool by releasing it under the GPLv2 license. The code is now available on CodePlex, Microsoft's Open Source software project hosting repository, over at wudt.codeplex.com. The actual installer for the tool is now again available for download at the Microsoft Store (2.59MB). (Microsoft previously took responsiblity for the violation.)"
I took a quick look at the article and I have no idea what this tool is supposed to do. I couldn't even venture a guess. So some tool that I know nothing about and have no idea what it does now has the source code available for it. I think the term "underwhelmed" would apply. What exactly is a USB/DVD download tool?
As someone mentioned in the original story, Microsoft does not write all of its code itself but sometimes hires other companies to write a specific tool for them. Such was the case here. As for it taking a week, I think that's a pretty short period of time for something to take in a bureaucracy.
It's a tool to download Windows 7 into a USB drive, hence it's a tool FOR Windows 7. Shortening it to "Windows 7 Tool" is just common English usage -- that's just like saying a drive for reading CD-ROMs is a CD-ROM drive. Get over it.
Pet peeve: Profane people propagating perfunctory pedantry.
Or it's proof that they made some changes so that the tool uses public API's instead of private windows internals and instead of just throwing it out the door, tested the changes made.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
I think your comment about asking the engineers to solve the right problem is very insightful.
But I'm curious - did Windows have more fine-grained locking than a single kernel lock at the time Linux introduced SMP support with 2.0? I can imagine Windows may well have been better re locking scalability back then. Both Linux and Windows have been using increasingly fine granularity locking over the years, which is nice. It's somewhat frustrating that the Big Kernel Lock is still hanging around but at least it's not on most / any important critical paths now. And one day hopefully it will go away properly :-)
<spit/>
Depends on your definition of "deprecate" and "decade". As late as last year (2008), the kernel people were still working on removing it.
Je ne parle pas francais.
You downloaded the tool (a.k.a. application), not the source code.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
I think it's quite sad the need to explicitly state that you are asking not implying, but kudos to you for good communication.
As to your question, v2 is the appropriate license.
The marketing department doesn't make these kinds of decisions, neither does the PR team. Yes, they may be involved but these things are decided (we use the term 'drivin') by the product teams.
Jibe!
The problem is that it's also been morally defined now that it's the moral responsibility of executives to look after the best interests of the company and by extension shareholders. Turning down a lucrative weapons contract wouldn't well represent the interests of the shareholders.
If executives are supposed to be responsible for their share holders, shareholders don't vote on most individual actions and a company is ammoral then you've got a problem since it's nobody's responsibility.
You could say it's the shareholders then that have a responsibility to only buy stocks from ethical companies but most shareholders represent large brokerage firms who are responsible for acquiring the maximum possible returns for investment funds. So that leaves it to the consumer to determine which retirement plan is going to be the least evil when all of them include large portfolios of hundreds of companies. Good luck figuring out the ethical from the unethical ones. And if you find a company you like but have a grievance with good luck organizing and voicing your opposition when you're mixed in with several hundred thousand other shareholders who also all have grievances.
Note, this isn't a W7 thing ,this all happened 8 years ago for XP SP2.
Jibe!
And by banned, he doesn't just mean there is a policy against them. They run regular code scans for "illegal" functions and then send out high priority bug reports to the code owners if any are found. I had to fix a couple of them when I worked there (and they weren't for strcpy, it was more subtly problematic functions). In my entire time at MS, I never saw one instance of strcpy. Usually the code used StringCchLength and StringCchCopy, which are not only safe if called with the appropriate buffer size, but function well with both ASCII and UTF-16 strings environments (though in practice, all our code was compiled with unicode support).
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Thank you; I sit corrected. However, if they are, as you say, using functions that don't allow unbounded copying, how do you explain all the buffer overflows. Granted, my programming skills are way out of date, but from where I sit it looks as though using copy functions with built-in bound-checking should prevent them.
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I'm not sure what buffer overflows you are refering to. We're very careful to use the bounds checked type of copies you are referring to. There are many ways to do this. The safe string copy functions are one, so is the new secure CRT. String handling C++ classes are anohter.
Of course, its impossible to claim that there are no 'run of the mill' buffer overlows in Windows XPSP2, Vista, Win7. But we went to great lenghts to avoid them. This includes code reviews, and the use of automated tools (static analysis) among others. But there are very, very few.
Of course, there are still things that need to be fixed and they may be due to simple coding errors, or they may be more complex.
-Foredecker
Jibe!
Indeed, something similar happened when at I was Sun. With modern servers you just have to have an IPMI client for remote lights-out management. The most popular one is IPMItool, an OS product that got support on Unix-like systems early on. But somebody managing a remote system might well be running Windows. IPMItool will run on Cygwin, but Sun can't redistribute Cygwin, so they needed to provide customers with a native Windows version. For that, they hired a software consulting firm to make the port, then released the source code in accordance with the original software license.
The difference here is that Sun is a very bureaucratic place where you can't do anything without jumping through all the right hoops. So if you use OS software or code, you're required to tell the company lawyers so they can make sure you don't break any rules. At other places I've worked, it was pretty common for some engineer to see some OS code he wanted to borrow and just go ahead and use it. Any OS license requirements might be ignored or the engineer might try to interpret them on his own, with the resulting mistakes that amateur lawyers always make. Either way you have a violation of the OS license that has more to do with stupidity than with any grand conspiracy. A classic example of Hanlon's Razor.