Posted on 01/16/2003 3:18:47 PM PST by Shermy
Russia will be the first country to get a look at one of the most closely guarded corporate secrets in the world: the blueprint for Microsoft's omnipresent Windows operating system.
The U.S. software titan said Wednesday that it would open the source code for Windows to governments and international organizations worldwide to enable them to beef up the security of their software, used for everything from designing weapons to managing money supplies.
The first two entities to sign up for the initiative, dubbed the Government Security Program, are Russia and NATO, but the company hopes governments and international organizations in some 60 countries will eventually be involved.
The move is seen by the international information technologies community as an attempt to slow the growth of Linux, Microsoft's principal rival in the lucrative market of government contracts. Unlike Windows, Linux is an operating system with an open source code, which allows programmers to modify it at will to enhance security.
Craig Mundie, a senior vice president at Microsoft, said the move was intended in part to dispel media reports and rumors posted on the Internet that a secret "back door" was built into Windows to allow the U.S. government to spy on its users, The New York Times reported Wednesday.
"This should go a long, long way toward eliminating the popular speculation in many countries that has been used to attack Microsoft," Mundie was quoted as saying.
"The issue is how comfortable are governments depending on the technology of a United States company and Microsoft in particular," he said. "As a technology platform, we want to be demonstrably neutral to national interests."
Under the program, governments will be able to access 97 percent of the blueprints for Windows versions used to run desktop computers, network servers and hand-held devices for analysis and testing. To view the other 3 percent -- the most sensitive part -- requires traveling to Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Washington.
Both Microsoft in Moscow and Russia's Federal Agency for Governmental Communications and Information, or FAPSI, declined to give details of the agreement, saying they would be announced Monday.
"This agreement is a significant step forward in implementation of information security requirements, which on the whole improves the opportunities Russia's governmental organizations have to launch and use protected information systems," said Boris Girichev, the head of NTTs Atlas, the company chosen by FAPSI to represent the government in the Government Security Program.
"The inaccessibility of source codes and other technical information has limited the opportunities of governmental organizations in Russia to use Microsoft products," he said.
The government has not yet announced a preference for which operating systems agencies and ministries use and will now have a chance to see how well Windows can be applied to ensure information security.
"This is a very good promotion move by the giant in a fight for a giant budget," said Anatoly Lebedev, president of Lancrypto, which specializes in data security. Still, at a length of tens of millions of lines, Lebedev doubts that any government team of professionals can seriously analyze the Windows coding.
"Without knowing concrete terms of the agreement, it's hard to say what it will lead to," he said.
Market research agency IDC estimates that a quarter of all servers sold worldwide in 2001 run on Linux and about half on Windows. In Russia, IDC says Linux's market share that year was less than 5 percent.
More than two dozen countries, including China and Germany, have been actively encouraging their ministries and agencies to use Linux or other open source operating systems.
"In the government sector the battle between open source products and Microsoft products is the fiercest. Several European governments have been seriously investigating Linux as an alternative to investing millions of dollars in Microsoft's operating systems," said Robert Farish, head of IDC's Moscow office.
"In Russia, IDC believes that two factors could be critical in this respect," Farish said.
"The first is state sector policy: Any serious state-led drive to use open source products could be very serious competition for Microsoft," he said. "Any such initiative would most likely focus on security concerns. In this respect Microsoft's government security program is very well timed."
Also important, Farish said, are planned changes in the way Microsoft collects revenue for its products. Microsoft is starting to offer a subscription arrangement as an alternative to purchasing software outright.
"In Russia, most operating system installations on low-end servers are unlicensed, i.e., pirated. Should Microsoft effectively prevent users from implementing unlicensed software using this new licensing model, this could initiate a major migration to open source products."
The GSP program is not the first move Microsoft has made to make Windows more "open." In 2001, the company launched the Shared Source Initiative to make its code more transparent for some of its clients.
Or in about 2 seconds if they are stupid enough to let the chinese peek.
Someone tell me exactly where the downside is to this though.
Oops, never mind...
I think its wonderful but im sure we'll be hearing the "downside" from a certain shill pretty soon.
Someone tell me exactly where the downside is to this though.One downside could be that a decent system coder will look at the code and point out to MicroSLOTH all the sloppy, messy code that makes Windows bloatware.
Another possibility is that these governments may decide against Winders once they see what a security risk the innards pose.
What if Russia finds a bug in windows and doesn't let MS know about it. Then they use that bug to attack US systems. Same issue we have with Open Source applies to MS releasing its source code.
The good thing is that if people do find bugs and report them MS is a profitable company which has the resources to fix them.
Did you see the source code before? Or do you have a link to provide support for your statement? Or is it just a cheap shot which you can't back up?
I guess it's ok if she puts on enough mascara and cheap lipstick.
Uh, well, I have been in the development of bootstrap loaders as far back as '97, for example, and I'll tell you two things: (1) I was aghast at the sloppy way they treated the hardware interface to our floppy controller, and (2) so was the Microsoft Engineer that was assigned to learn from us what was wrong with their code.
But that's just one example, and you probably want all examples described first hand before you'll believe that some people might have valid poor opinions of the innards of certain MS products.
Keeping Redmond private and secret is not the opposite of open source, -THIS- idea is! This is the worst POSSIBLE idea to disclose the source under NDA to certain potentially evil hackers, but not also the generally benevolent hackers at large. The point of open-source is that all eyes (good and bad) might catch a bug/hole equally, and that some good nerds will be motivated to shout out the bug for self-gratification and notoriety more often than secret bad guys can exploit the same holes for nefarious goals.
I hope I'm wrong.
Respecfully, I suspect you are.
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