www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/2/15/71552/7795
Some dummy files of similar size, containing just strings of zeroes, have also circulated. There has been some speculation that while the bulk of the source is genuine, some of the comments have been tampered with to embarrass Microsoft. The embarrassing comments occur on thousands of lines, in realistic places. Furthermore, if someone had done that, it would have been easy to make the comments far more incriminating. Embarrassments In the struggle to meet deadlines, I think pretty much all programmers have put in comments they might later regret, including swearwords and acerbic comments about other code or requirements. Also, any conscientious coder will put in prominent comments warning others about the trickier parts of the code. Comments like UGLY TERRIBLE HACK tend to indicate good code rather than bad: in bad code ugly terrible hacks are considered par for the course. It would therefore be both hypocritical and meaningless to go through the comments looking for embarrassments. Curse words: there are a dozen or so fucks and shits, and hundreds of craps.
Quality Despite the above, the quality of the code is generally excellent. Modules are small, and procedures generally fit on a single screen. The commenting is very detailed about intentions, but doesnt fall into add one to i redundancy. Some functions describe their variables in a comment block, some dont. Microsoft appears not to have fallen into the trap of enforcing over-rigid standards or universal use of over-complicated automatic tools. Some of the modules are clearly suffering from the hacks upon hacks mentioned earlier. As someone who struggled immensely trying to get the MSInet control working not long after this code was released, its a relief to see that the inet code is as bad as I thought. From the comments, it also appears that most of the uglier hacks are due to compatibility issues: either backward-compatibility, hardware compatibility or issues caused by particular software. Microsofts vast compatibility strengths have clearly come at a cost, both in developer-sweat and the elegance and hence stability and maintainability of the code. Open Source Its been widely rumored for a while that Microsoft relies on stolen open source code. Microsoft has hundreds of millions of lines of code, most of it highly specialized. Hardly any of that could benefit from stealing: it hardly seems worth the legal risk. Its true that early versions of the TCP-IP stack were legally taken from BSD: but that was a long time ago, when Microsoft was much smaller. GNU finds a lot of references to a GNUmakefile in privategenxshell, which in turn mentions a mode for Emacs. This is apparently legitimate: simply using a makefile does not apply the makefiles copyright to the resulting code. Therefore, a superficial look at the code finds no evidence that Microsoft has violated the GPL or stolen other open source code. Favoritism Its noticeable that a lot of the hacks refer to individual applications. In some cases they are non-Microsoft, such as this case : a Borland compiler came to depend on an existing bug, so their fix worked to preserve some of the bugs behaviour. But just as often these application-specific fixes are for Microsofts own apps. There seems to be an informal hierarchy when it comes these: Microsoft apps take precedence, then major software companies like IBM and Borland. Its also interesting to finally see references to the notorious undocumented features, which Microsoft application developers have long been known to use.
Microsoft do appear to be checking for buffer overruns in the obvious places. The amount of networking code here is small enough for Microsoft to easily check for any vulnerabilities that might be revealed: its the big applications that pose more of a risk. This code is also nearly four years old: any obvious problems should be patched by now. Microsofts fears that this code will be pirated by its competitors also seem largely unfounded. With application code this would be a risk, but its hard to see Microsofts operating system competitors taking advantage of it. Neither Apple nor Linux are in a much of position to steal code and get away with it, even if it was useful to them. Problems are generally due to a trade-off of current quality against vast hardware, software and backward compatibility.
There are probably 20 different source control programs in use at Microsoft both built in house and commercial. Copyright versus trade secret none / 1 150 by swr on Wed Feb 18th, 2004 at 02:41:07 PM EST One thing I dont understand is, why is it assumed that the source code is copyrighted? As I understand it, that is a requirement, the idea being that once the copyright expires the works become public domain, which to be at all useful the works need to be publicly available. To that end, it used to be necessary to file works with the copyright office, though that is no longer a requirement.
Problems with the apps get fixed in the OS instead of in the app as they are supposed to be. First, anyone with a crappy app can use the source and make their own hacked up version of the OS, and secondly, the rest of the world would remove any dirty hacks meant to cover the arse of a badly behaved app that they dont use and redistribute. The flawed app would either get its act together and be fixed or people would use something else. This is not nearly as worrying as the prospect of Microsoft, in subsequent years claiming that this leaked code has somehow been stolen and incorporated into GNU software. Huh huh huh - Butthead bullshit by alexpoppinfresh, 02/19/2004 02:12:51 PM EST none / 2 Re:Ion.
This will kill Windows Explorer, leaving a system where you can only access the last application you used. Great for Internet Caffees and libraries, since you cannot access the TaskBar, StartMenu, Desktop or anything else. Unless you have a terminal open or a scheduled wake up task, you wont be able to restart explorer, hence youll be forced to reboot afterwards.
This cursory glance does not find any evidence that Microsoft has stolen any open source code. While it obviously is something wrong with this terminology you do not steal source code, and BSD-licensed code is intended to be used without particularly many restrictions, there is no doubt that Microsoft is using BSD licensed code in their Microsoft Windows product. And that I can say without having come anyway near the Windows source code. So how can I be so sure about that Microsoft is using BSD licensed code? Well, the BSD licenses require that the copyright holder is credited in documentation provided with binary distributions of the code. In their release notes for their Windows XP operating system , Microsoft credits a bunch of well-known copyright holders of open source products. It contains credits not only to the University of California at Berkeley, but also companies such as Hewlett-Packard and to individuals such as Luigi Rizzo and Phil Karn. The conclusions are that there is no doubt that Microsoft are using open source in their products, that they are not afraid to show it, and that they are playing by the rules by crediting the copyright holders.
Not that its altogether surprising that some developers at MS are going to be unaware of undocumented API calls - its a huge organization, after all - but note that two of the examples there are from the Hyperterminal source, which I dont think originated from Microsoft. In fact, its About dialog mentions that portions of the code are licensed from a company called Hilgraeve.
Well from all the comments about putting hacks in Windows to fix Office apps, it would appear that they were lying. Not that anybody who knows how software is written ever thought otherwise, but this makes it about as plain as it could be that the Office and OS guys work together to achieve their famous smoothness of operation - an advantage writers of other office suites clearly dont have. If we had a real attorney general instead of a fascist corporate toady theyd probably be back in court already over it. Will they say, as Roger Williams said of some of the Massachusetts Indians, that we were wolve...
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