Everyone’s talking about it. Microsoft admits their source code has been released. There’s code for Windows 2000 and NT 4.0 out there, and available via your favourite file sharing application, pretty much for all to see. It came from Microsoft, possibly through MainWin, created by Mainsoft, a company set out to porting Windows applications to run on Linux systems! Tying in how MainWin works with the need for source, sure makes it all the more interesting.
CNN is reporting there was profanity in the code as well. All this thanks to Microsoft’s shared source initiative. It seems that the NT4 code looks quite complete at 28 million lines of code (versus 13.5 million lines for Windows 2000). I can see this helping the Samba team out. Heck, even the Linux NTFS team will benefit. But don’t look at the source.
Let’s not taint Linux. Let’s not let Microsoft pull a SCO on us. Besides, Microsoft is worried how others will now “hack” into Microsoft-based systems. Let’s get real and wake up – the open source model promotes having code out there for peer review and for anyone to find bugs; we don’t see millions of machines being cracked into, do we?
Of course, this means Microsoft has to release much less sloppy code. And people may find bugs out there… And folk may fix bugs for Microsoft, who take rather long to get patches out. Microsoft users, beware; beware not because the source is out, but beware because you hope Microsoft becomes a more active proponent in a better security model.