<nettime> ms code or ms dogma

[Drazen Pantic <drazen@xs4all.nl>]

Only a week after news about half a year long security problems with
the Microsoft internal network, a giant was attacked again. Anonymous
hacker Dimitri from Netherlands claimed to have penetrated MS Web
servers. "I could add Trojan horses to software that Microsoft
customers download" - Dimitri said. MS "experts" and independent
security advisors confirmed that intrusion really did happen, and that
one does not have to be a rocket scientist to get into MS network,
[1].


Almost in parallel, the Halloween letter of Bill Gates to MS staff was
published in [2]. Apparently, the text on the linux.com, [3], is
authentic. In his address to his employees, Gates sent lots of bitterness
and critique towards Linux, and more importantly Open Source project
and idea. Even if the email that was leaked on linux.com is not
literally authentic word by word, it is clear that MS is not big time
supporter of the Open Source, and that Gates could have written
something like that.


So, moral of last two weeks is:

* MS will of course continue to stay far away from Open Source, and
keep its CODE secret, in a dogmatic closed web of high tech priests;

* many not_necessarily_rocket_scientists will continue to attack, and
some of them manage to get into MS servers and even internal network -
eventually changing material on the ftp servers or even code of the
future products;

* no one will be sure that malfunction or strange behavior of any
future MS system is a consequence of the hardware or software error or
deliberately implanted virus from some Dimitri.


Rigid orientation towards code_as_a_dogma approach of MS implies that
the company does not care about an incredibly important aspect in
relation with its costumers: transparency. The ghost of doubt is out:
no one outside of MS is able to check the consequences and the source
of possible instabilities of WinOS, while MS engineers are not capable
to cope with complexities of the system they were hiding from possible
competition...and everybody else.









[1] http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/00/11/03/001103hnhacker.xml
[2] http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/02/002213&mode=thread
[3] http://linux.com/newsitem.phtml?sid=1&aid=11143

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