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Yawn

Re: MS is communist

Yeah I've heard this drivel for a while. No corporation discloses everything about their product or their activities, except where required by law. That's the nature of competition. You have your secret sauce, and so does your competitor. Each desperately wants to find out what each other's sauce is made of, and would jump at the chance to learn it. The difference with OSS is the companies that support it largely have their secret sauce in something else, like their hardware, or their internal business operations that support their service. It's not in the software for the most part. For example, does Intel disclose everything about how they make their chips (except for what they've patented)? Do they disclose 100% of how they designed their chips to achieve their hardware features or performance? I haven't looked, but I can guess at the answer pretty reliably.

Do they disclose the machine language/signal specifications for their chips? Of course, so that customers can use them. Hiding that information would be silly, because then no one could use their chips and they'd have no customer base. With commercial companies, they disclose some things about their products, but not other aspects, which they consider to be trade secrets.

MS has made more information publicly available than it used to. They've documented their APIs pretty thoroughly online so you don't need an MSDN subscription to get access to it. The only source code they provide is examples so developers get an idea of how to use their APIs, but they tend to not disclose the code beneath their APIs, with a few exceptions. There's [url=http://channel9.msdn.com/]Channel 9[/url], which gives general inside information on what they're working on before they release products to the public. There are quite a few MS employee blogs that disclose similar information, though I doubt there's source code on them, except for example "usage" code.

I understand what you want to see is 100% of the source code, and anything less is communist to you, and that's your preference. Just understand that it's not everybody's preference. Personally I'd rather not look at the source code of some underlying infrastructure I'm putting software on top of if I don't have to, but then I'm a business applications developer, not a hardware hacker.

I do like having the ability to look at the underlying code from time to time. I liked the fact that quite a bit of source code was made available in MFC (I stayed away from VB), though generally I avoided reading it. Only looked at it when I had to. The .Net API can be decompiled (it's not obfuscated though I can't vouche for 100% of that codebase), and there are free tools available that allow you to do just that.

Posted by: Mark Miller   Posted on: 05/09/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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