So the Windows source code that was leaked this week is considered to be good solid code, of excellent quality. And no one seems to know who leaked it, though it looks to have come from a partner of MSFT.
I wonder who could benefit from a public exposure of well-written but not-too-revealing source code?
I haven’t seen any reports that this stuff represents any crown jewels, nor does it contain the buffer overruns and other stuff that plagues Windows users on a regular basis. I’m not saying it happened this way, but what if MSFT caused some less-valuable and well-craft code to be distributed? The possible benefits?
* they look like a victim, rather than a villain for a change
* the code is impressive enough to blunt the usual criticisms of sloppy coding (it’s even commented, albeit profanely)
* since it doesn’t give away any secrets, it doesn’t create any real risks of IP lossage (though clever hackers could infer some things from these samples, perhaps, or at least learn something about the “house style” at MSFT)
The link below suggests another twist, though it doesn’t consider the leak as a “deliberate accident.”
Windows Leak An Experiment in Open Source?:
Less than a week after it discovered that parts of its Windows 2000 and NT source code were leaked to the Internet, Microsoft (Quote, Chart) officials are now finding that a kind of grassroots peer review of its code is sprouting among programmers and the merely curious from all points of the globe.