The Case For Making Windows XP Open Source (And Why It's A Bad Idea)

Forbes ^ | 24 April 2014 | Tony Bradley

[ShadowAce]

It has been over two weeks now since Microsoft support for Windows XP expired. So far, the world as we know it has not come to a grinding halt for Windows XP users, but that isn’t a reason to let your guard down—it’s really just a matter of time. With hundreds of millions of Windows XP systems still in use by businesses, government agencies, and individuals around the world, maybe Microsoft Microsoft should make the operating system open source and let developers take over.

When May 13 rolls around, things might start to look different. Many XP users viewed April 8 as some sort of “Y2K” event—as if their PCs would either stop working properly on April 9, or it was all just a bunch of needless hysteria. Stay calm and XP on.

The reality is that April 8 was just the beginning of the end, not the end itself. Where Y2K was a single event, and even the Heartbleed vulnerability that has gotten so much attention lately was a single vulnerability, Windows XP is an open wound that will never be patched. From April 8 forward, every vulnerability discovered in Windows XP will be a “zero day” vulnerability, and there won’t be any lifeline coming from Microsoft to help protect you from it.

Some are suggesting that a “black market” will emerge for Windows XP patches. That may very well be true. Just as attackers can reverse-engineer the patches Microsoft releases for the supported versions of Windows and find out where the vulnerability is to exploit it in Windows XP, independent developers could reverse-engineer to find the vulnerabilities and create a patch to protect Windows XP.

Ensuring the integrity and stability of the rogue patches, however, and safely distributing and applying them might present a...

[2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten]

If Microsoft made the source code for Windows public then HP (which bought Compaq, which bought DEC) would finally be able to prove Microsoft plagiarized the VMS kernel.
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If that’s all it needs then HP needs to contact me ... I was thoroughly involved in the very similar case of NCR/Comten (ex-Bell Labs) theft of IBM’s VTAM that NCR could never quite get right on their boxes (memory leaks) ,, they were so stupid that they even left in the comments from the original IBM code...

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I worked in a very similar division at IBM and the word back then was that Fujitsu had done exactly this - plagiarized IBM code down to the comments.

[2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten]