Spin the wheel of fortune

Friday 13th of February, 2004 - 12:23 – Permalink

Several resources across the web are reporting that parts of the Windows 2000 and Windows NT source code has leaked out into the wild:

OK, so what's the big deal anyway? I'd say there are two very serious implications of the leak. First of all I'd say it's quite likely we'll see a whole wave of new worms and virii as a result of the security holes which are likely to be discovered in the code. This, if you ask me, is the lesser concern of the two.

The much more serious implication is the fact that this gives Microsoft a perfect opportunity to launch legal attacks on projects like Samba, Linux-NTFS, Wine, and ReactOS, to name a few. Even if not even a single developer of any of these projects so much as looked at the code, Microsoft is likely to be able find enough "evidence" to drag these projects into court. Regardless of the outcome, a messy legal battle is never a good thing for a community-driven project. I, for one, feel that it may only be a matter of time before one of the projects mentioned above finds itself in the scenario I just depicted. Hopefully I'll be proven wrong.

BlogWoes

I still update this site mostly by hand. I was reminded of one of the disadvantages with this approach when I noticed I had forgotten to note the entry time the last few weeks. Argh.

In semi-related news I found a little something on well-designed weblogs. That, in turn, led me to the rather cool site of Dunstan. He's done some pretty cool things on his site, using homebrewed stuff. He won't give out his own scripts, but recommends WordPress, which seems like a blogging tool ahead of the game. Judging from the site, that is. Haven't had time to try it out as of yet...