linux in australian government

[Stephen Rothwell]

On Sat, 18 Jan 2003 08:46:57 +1100 (EST) "Howard Lowndes" <lannet at lannet.com.au> wrote:
>
> Mark Purcell said:
> >
> > Saw an article in yesterday's SMH stating that M$ are going to let
> > governments have access to 95% of the source code in their products, in
> > an effort to stem the tide of places who are pickup up OSS like Germany,
> > China,  Peru and everyone else who thinks there are US Government
> > backdoors in the  M$ products.
> 
> The problem is: you won't know what is in the 5% that is not going to be
> open source.  You also have to consider how they intend releasing this
> "open source" to governments, and whether governments will have the
> resources, or the ability to access resources (you can bet on a highly
> prescriptive NDA), to actually do anything with the source once they have
> access to it.

Make no mistake, this is not "Open Source" in any sense and we sould be
careful to not use that term in association with this "offer" from MS.  My
understanding is that MS will allow (selected) governments to "inspect"
the source, not build their own OS from it  i.e. even if you can inspect
all the source, you still have no guarantee that what you see is what is
in the binary that you run ...

By the way: the other 5% (I heard 3%) van be inspected if you are willing
to send someone to Redmond ...

-- 
Cheers,
Stephen Rothwell                    sfr at canb.auug.org.au
http://www.canb.auug.org.au/~sfr/