Microsoftens (LinuxUser) [LWN.net]

Eben Moglen, General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation, writes this LinuxUser article looking at Microsoft and free software. "Competing with free software is problematic for Microsoft for many reasons. There's no company to acquire, in the first place, in order to incorporate or suppress attractive competing products - a strategy that the monopoly has pursued so often and so successfully in the past. Because free software is continually modified and improved by all its users, there's no 'evolutionary dead end' argument with which to scare customers: someone choosing to use free software is never going to be left with an unserviceable product whose maker has gone out of business, leaving the code 'orphaned' in the face of constantly shifting technology."

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Shared Source is a Farce

Posted Feb 28, 2003 4:55 UTC (Fri) by anandsr (guest, #3160) [Link] (2 responses)

Actually Microsoft offers governmental users to view the Windows source code but not the complete source code. They divide the code into three parts, one they will provide to you to view. For the second part you can come to Redmond to view. The Third part will not be revealed. The third part contains stuff that they are ashamed of like IE. Anyway until they can provide the source code to all of the code and you can build that code through a known compiler (whose code is also available, and which can build itself), its not going to be helpful as far as security is concerned. Also the whole buildable source must be available to even fix any problems that you encounter

Shared Source is a Farce

Posted Feb 28, 2003 17:08 UTC (Fri) by emk (subscriber, #1128) [Link] (1 responses)

Remember Ken Thompson's famous article, Reflections on Trusting Trust. The thrust of this argument: even if you have trustworthy source to your OS, trustworthy source to your compiler, and an untrusted compiler binary, there's no way to compile a trusted OS.

In theory, what a security-conscious government should insist on is (a) full source to Windows and (b) full source to Visual Studio which can be compiled with gcc. Then they should pick a random proprietrary Unix compiler, use it to bootstrap GCC, cross-compile GCC onto Windows, use it to compile Visual Studio, then use Visual Studio to compile Windows. This would make it very hard to use Ken Thompson's trick; you'd need to have elaborate compromises in a dozen different vendor compilers.

Of course, this is a moot point, because any codebase the size of Windows or Linux contains security bugs, and I'm pretty sure the intelligence agencies have a big enough budget to find a few of them. Backdoors, elaborate or otherwise, are probably completely unnecessary.

Reflections on Trusting Trust: the backstory

Posted Mar 3, 2003 16:49 UTC (Mon) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

Everyone always wondered if he'd really done it -- the ACM piece doesn't actually say.

So I asked.

The most interesting part of this

Posted Feb 28, 2003 15:23 UTC (Fri) by fdesloges (guest, #291) [Link]

Hmmm! These are arguments that used to be more often heard from ESR and
other OSS preachers.

It's good to hear this as much as it was good to hear OSS people singing
FreeSoftware arguments to some market player trying to stretch the
OpenSource concept a little bit to far into the proprietary turf, some
time ago.

I always thought that OSS and FS were 2 complementary descriptions of the
same reality. Ignoring one of these 2 points of view only create a less
exact picture of the subject, both are necessary to exploit the concept
to its full potential.

The greatest benefit of this worldwild forum called the Net is that it
multiplies the points of view on a subject, creating higher probability
to reach the truth on its nature.