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.)"

Good.

[dsavi]

It's good that Microsoft took responsibility for this, kudos to them.

Re:Good.

[Akido37]

I suppose it's a testament to the strength of the GPL in the court system. If Microsoft thought for a minute that the courts wouldn't uphold the GPL, they wouldn't have bothered to open source anything.

Re:Good.

[nametaken]

It is good, but I'm uncomfortable with how this whole thing unfolded. It reads like, "Woot... caught em! Engage the GPL virus! F-U Microsoft!" As if a battle was won and they're over there shaking their heads about having lost something.

Open Source is not supposed to be a punishment you get slapped with. It's about availability, encouraging development and creating better software. Let's not jeer too much, eh?

Re:Good.

[nacturation]

Because heaven forbid the alternative: that they were informed they did something wrong and then voluntarily did the right thing, regardless of how enforceable the license is.

For a company

[Dartz-IRL]

For a company that believes so strongly in the inviolability of Software licensing, it's nice to see them practice what they preach when it comes to the rights of others. Fair play to Microsoft for meeting it's requirements, and score one for the GPL and Open Source.

Re:PROOF!

[badboy_tw2002]

You apparently have never worked in a large company before. There were probably 27 meetings before someone high enough up the food chain stuck their neck out to say "ok". We're talking about opensourcing code from a company that generally doesn't do it. Legal was involved, top executives were involved, someone had to talk to PR about spinning a press release, etc etc. This isn't like some dev got emailed and said, "Shit! I better get that posted right away!"

Re:PROOF!

[Anonymous Coward]

And this post is PROOF that you're a MORON. Microsoft hires the most expensive people. They may outsource some of their coding, but if you think Microsoft writes any "worse" code than anyone else, you're an idiot. It's like you think suddenly because highly paid, highly educated, highly experienced developers start working for a company you irrationally hate that they become bad developers.

The bigger news here

[onyxruby]

The bigger news is not that Microsoft open sourced the tool after their GPL violation (that was inevitable). The news here is that Microsoft kept the open source tool instead of replacing it with one of their own. Microsoft has open sourced portions of their code before, that really isn't newsworthy. Keeping an open source tool that will be used to deploy their crown jewel operating system by millions of people - that's newsworthy.

Re:Good.

[dsavi]

I'm not sure that it unfolded like that, unless you're talking about the comments on Slashdot. You would think that most people here would have grown out of the "M$" phase.

Finally?

[Rix]

It's been, what, a month since they were informed of the lapse, and less than that since they acknowledged the error?

Show a reasonable amount of patience.

/. Bias

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't help but notice the "finally" in the title.
Really slashdot, can't you post any MS related story without personal bias?

Re:PROOF!

[techno-vampire]

The problem is no one asks them to do the right things.

If what you write is true, the reason there's still buffer overflows in Microsoft code is simply that nobody's asked the programmers to get rid of them. Frankly, I find htat hard to believe.

Re:Good.

[sunderland56]

Or the other alternative: the marketing department decided that releasing this trivial small amount of code would make Microsoft look better to the open source community, whereas fighting the matter in court would make them look bad.

Re:Good.

[Locutus]

mod this funny people, I LOL'ed on this one.

'Microsoft voluntarily do the right thing', ha. It probably had to go through 12 committee layers just to make sure it can't be used on any OS other than Windows and must not benefit anyone who does cross platform development. Because of the GPL, they probably had to run it through another 12 committee layers to clean up the code. This took loads more expense and effort than they probably wanted to put into it and you can thank the GPL for that. It's probably one reason why they really really dislike the GPL. Their code review and licensing policies are so bad that stuff like what happened with this tool costs them bucket loads of time, effort, and money and then they have to walk out into public and post their code. I can see Microsoft's executive team spitting every time they here "GPL" as if someone from Dog River said "Wullerton"

LoB

Re:PROOF!

[lewiscr]

filled with hacks like the Big Global Lock that used to be in the Linux kernel

The spinning hourglass begs to differ.

Re:PROOF!

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Eh... I understand what you are saying. And yet, Linux has never produced anything nearly as bad as Longhorn. Seriously, Long- freaking-horn. You can't praise them for 2000 and xp SP2 and ignore their obvious mistakes with xp/xp-sp1 and longhorn/vista. Every version of windows that is released is accompanied by a story interviewing some Microsoft fellow that describes how bad the source code for the previous version was and how no one really knows how all of the different parts of windows interact. I'm sure its not bad code full of obvious hackery and bad coding. I am however convinced that its a more difficult of a design than the Unix philosophy and it suffers because of that.

Plus, as closed source we can just sort of imagine the code that causes the problems we run into, where as with linux we can actually see the code that caused the problem so we don't have to imagine any code crappier than what we find.

Re:PROOF!

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Anyway, trust me - it's very professional, clean code, nice design, and not filled with hacks like the Big Global Lock that used to be in the Linux kernel.

Bad example. Just about every uniprocessor-developed OS had a Big Global Lock until they went multi-cpu - and even then it usually took a few releases before it was really eliminated. I would be hugely surprised to find that the Win9x series didn't have one too. When did the linux kernel deprecate it? Like a decade ago?

Re:Good.

[quadrox]

Yes, it would really be nice if that were the case.

I have long held a more or less neutral opinion on Microsoft for a very long time, until they pulled all those OOXML stunts. Since then I have become aware of more and more of their evil scheming to ruthlessly achieve their goals that I simply cannot believe in a good Microsoft any longer. I'm not even out there looking for stuff about Microsoft, I just happen upon it from time to time and each time my opinion is confirmed more and more.

There may well be individuals in Microsoft who want to do the right thing - sadly none of them seem to be able to exert any power whatsoever. And while you might argue with me that this incident proves me wrong, from past experience I must still believe it more likely that Microsoft is acting out of pure self-interest.

Microsoft needs to be boycotted at all costs. This company can not be allowed to continue to exist while one evil scheme after another is revealed with nobody doing anything about it.

Re:PROOF!

[DaveV1.0]

This third party code would have been produced under contract as "work for hire". Presumably, the contract stated that the third party had to assign all rights to the code to Microsoft, like any other work for hire, and that the end product must be wholly assignable.

Most likely, the third party actually violated their contract with Microsoft by creating a work that uses GPLed code.

Re:Good.

[insertwackynamehere]

A company is not a conscious entity and acts of capitalism are not "evil" on their own. You have witnessed Microsoft make money in a society based around the freedom to make and lose money. If Microsoft sold weapons to a foreign country that they knew were going to be used to kill innocent people, because it paid well, then the people who approved such deals would be evil, or at least morally wrong. Microsoft furthering it's company's agenda in the global marketplace is capitalism. And open source is included in the global marketplace always, not just when convenient. You can't run away crying because you played with the big kids and got hurt.

Re:Good.

[shaitand]

Why is this modded troll? It isn't just a random flame. Microsoft has long and well established history in this department and it is perfectly valid to doubt anything that appears to be a deviation from it.

Last I checked Microsoft is run by the same anti-competitive CEO who refers to the GPL as cancer.

Re:Good.

[Anonymous Coward]

The marketing department has nothing to do with this you buffoon. They just release the code because there's no reason not to, and because it's the right thing to do.

You conspiracy numbnuts can go fuck off.

Re:Good.

[jpmorgan]

All I can think of is Stac vs. Microsoft was over 15 years ago.

Re:Good.

[shaitand]

"A company is not a conscious entity and acts of capitalism are not "evil" on their own."

Actually it is an emergence consciousness like an ant colony or... a human brain. As for acts of capitalism being "evil" on their own, you need to back that up.

"You have witnessed Microsoft make money in a society based around the freedom to make and lose money."

I'm not sure which society that is. This society is based on freedom from government oppression. Capitalism is a tangent and this society won't lose what it is based on if those ideals are expanded to include freedom from oppression in the name of profit.

"Microsoft furthering it's company's agenda in the global marketplace is capitalism."

Microsoft has been intentionally stifling the advancement of technology from the very start when it intentionally sold an inferior system to run on IBM.

What could man have accomplished without the interference from Microsoft in this time? Where would we be? Would we have stabalized the global market? Enhanced communication to the point of eliminating corruption? World peace? Colonized alien worlds? Developed penthouse clone sex slave bots who can cook and sell 2 for the price of one at walmart?

Some of those are difficult to believe or impossible to imagine but all are theoretical improvements with advanced technology or facilitated by advanced technology.

Re:Good.

[egarland]

This is not simply a company furthering it's own agenda and competing as companies do. They intentionally break the rules and systematically use anti-competitive, sneaky, underhanded and illegal activity to further their agenda. Most people have to work with Microsoft in some way to get our jobs done but that doesn't mean we have to pretend they aren't evil.

Re:Good.

[morgan_greywolf]

First of all, yes, a company is an emerging conscious. That's the reason why we have the entire body of corporate law in the first place. If you don't believe me, ask a lawyer who specializes in corporate law. Anyway, you don't really believe that Microsoft isn't a conscious entity yourself, since you've said that Microsoft has been witnessed 'making money" and "further it's [own] agenda". You can't your cake and eat it, too.

I'm all for capitalism. After all, I'm an anarcho-capitalist. There is nothing wrong with the pursuit of capitalism, as long as everyone is playing by the rules.

The problem is that Microsoft has a history of not playing by rules, and, in fact, deliberately ignoring them.

The GPL is a permission to make and distribute copies of modified or unmodified code. If you use GPL'd code in a program you wrote, you gotta play by GPL's rules, which says that if you use the code in your program, you gotta GPL your program. If you don't agree, then you have no permission at all to make copies and you have just committed copyright infringement.

We have no reason to believe that Microsoft is being honest of their own accord here because their track record speaks for itself. If what Microsoft did to the ISO committees on OOXML and ODF isn't illegal, it's downright dishonest and unethical.

Without ethics, our society will devolve into chaos. Your choice: you can support an unethical company or not. But if you choose to act ethically for yourself, then why would you demand any less from the people you do business with?

Re:Good.

[jonbryce]

Their legal department would have told them that they could either release the code or agree a compensation settlement with the copyright holder. Download managers are not core technology for Microsoft and there is nothing to be lost from releasing the code, so they did that.

Re:PROOF!

[theArtificial]

I'm sure its very pretty. But at the end of the day, it doesn't work as well as the Linux kernel.

Obviously you haven't experienced the joy related to binary Linux drivers (WIFI and 3D come to mind). Let me guess you're doing studio audio production on Linux because of the low latency performance?

Linux makes for an awesome hackable server and it is very flexible. The tools available for networking and development stand on their own but the awesome begins to fade after that. If only BeOS had lived (yes I've been following HaikuOS)...

Re:PROOF!

[MarkKB]

Linux audio. Just... Linux audio.

---

Most of the senior engineers at the time were working on Windows Server 2003. The people working on Longhorn were less experienced, and after a bit they started to put their pet projects into Windows, similar to the Copland fiasco Apple went through. (The difference was probably pride rather than fear of getting fired, like "see that? That's my idea!", but meh.)

Jim Allchin wrote his "I'd buy a Mac" memo here.

After they shipped Server 2003, they tried to clean up the Longhorn mess - first by cutting out some of the projects, then by stripping it down and then building up to Server 2003-level. Only then did they decide it was too unworkable, and decided to rebuild straight from the Server 2003 codebase.

Not trying to refute anything here, just giving some background info. Yeah, they definitely could have done a lot better, but they also could have done worse, and I'm not sure that open source would have helped them at all.