In a startling revelation that took the Microsoft employees by surprise, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that Microsoft would be making the source code of all Operating systems they manufacture open source.
This announcement was certainly not expected from a company whose engineers working on the code themselves didn’t have full access to it.
The internal memo send by Steve Ballmer to the Microsoft engineers said that:
Considering the openness of Unix based system, Windows was losing the trust from end users, to plug the gap between us and other open source operating systems, we will soon be making the code that drives Windows Operating Systems Open Source.
This decision was very tough, but going forward we know that it would be the right approach to getting more community support for Windows based operating systems.
Our goal at Microsoft is not only to make money, but to also make sure that people get their monies worth, with the decision to make the code open source, we are pretty sure that, there will be lesser vulnerabilities for Windows, which in turn would make Windows more secure.
The security in Unix based systems, is partly because the code is open source and there are a huge number of developers, who devote time to keep the system bug free and threat free.
We see a brighter future for Windows by going open source and would be more than thrilled to have your support for this initiative.
The Microsoft employee who forwarded us this email was pretty aghast at this decision, as he himself had access to only part of the code, his main problem was that before going open source, Microsoft could have made the entire code available to engineers, who could then limit the vulnerabilities happening in the first place.
Microsoft has not yet made a official announcement in this regard, but this news is definitely pretty good for everyone who uses the Windows operating system.
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