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While deciding whether to love or hate Microsoft's wares is sometimes a decision based more on industry politics than it is on objective analysis, even Billy Boy himself admits that they're doing very poorly in one particular area:

Security.

Now Microsoft didn't get where it is today without making extensive use of cunning tactics and spinmeisters, so they first addressed the matter of their poor security record by launching a "Trustworthy Computing" initiative.

This programme, we were told, would see thousands of MS-geeks pawing over millions of lines of source code in a concerted effort to squash all those nasty security holes that were lurking there.

Guess what?

It didn't work.

One only has to reflect on the massively disruptive effect of the Slammer Worm that recently swept across the face of the globe in just a few minutes to see what I mean. It was only able to do so because of a security hole in Microsoft's SQL server software.

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Of course Microsoft's response was that they'd patched that hole already so it was really a sysadmin problem, not a software one. Unfortunately for the "what egg? what face?" crew at Microsoft, some of their own systems were compromised by this very software flaw because the incredibly onerous task of keeping buggy code patched to the latest release was too much even for them.

So, having failed to convince the world that "Trustworthy Computing" was anything more than just another press release from the rapidly rotating offices of Microsoft's PR department, a new initiative was launched:

The "Government Security Programme"

This time they're once again claiming that they're "trustworthy" and to prove it, they're going to make bits of Windows source code available to those governments who sign up to some unknown terms and conditions (which might even involve a long-term commitment to purchase -- who knows?)

The clear in intent is to try and steer governments away from Open Source alternatives.

However, my question is: who really cares?

Shame on any government who thinks that the act of sharing a few lines of source code will suddenly make Microsoft's code less vulnerable to compromise by dedicated crackers.

It strikes me that if Billy's own boys have already spent many man-years trawling this code for bugs and failed, there's probably not a lot of chance that some civil servant is going to spot the next big vulnerability while scanning idly through thousands of pages of C++ source.

And even if they did find a glaring hole -- they wouldn't be allowed to fix it under the terms of the code-sharing agreement.

The whole thing smacks of just more spin from Redmond.

The decision-making process probably went something like this:

And thus was born the decision to let politicians oggle bits of code from MS in the hope that it would produce warm, fuzzy feelings of security.

Let's hope that our politicians take a long hard look at just how ineffective "Trustworth Computing" was and realise that being able to browse Billy's source will do absolutely NOTHING to reduce the number of holes and the effect those holes have on the security of systems that may form a critical part of our governmental infrastructure.

But just what are the chances that they'll be smart enough to spot the fact that this is nothing more than another cunning Microsoft ploy?

You tell me.

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