Microsoft hits new ethical low point?

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

Derek Martin  writes:
| I fear the day that Microsoft manages to convince some idiot on Capitol
| Hill that open-source software should be banned.

Well, a lot of people are already  afraid  to  install  anything  but
Microsoft  software,  as  in  the past a lot of people were afraid of
anything that didn't come from IBM.  We'll always  have  idiots  like
this, and a lot of them will be in top management.

Within the government, there's a useful argument:  Something that the
security  guys keep telling us is that you shouldn't install anything
unless you have the source and have studied it. (Or paid an underling
to study it.  ;-)

The reason is simple and obvious. If you install binary software, you
have  no  way  of  knowing what is hidden inside it.  The programmers
could have been paid by someone to install all  sorts  of  trapdoors,
and you'll only learn about it when it's too late.

In the  case  of  Microsoft,  they  have  been  caught  in  the  past
delivering software that silently sends a list of the contents of the
disk back to a Microsoft  site.   They  also  deliver  software  that
accepts  code from the Net and runs it without the user's permission.
These aren't accidents.  If you run a Microsoft OS, you  are  sharing
all your data with Microsoft.

Is this the sort of software that should  be  running  on  government
computers?   Even  the least knowledgeable security analyst would say
that such things should be banned.

The only defense against such things is to demand full source for all
software  installed  on  government  computers.  If there's the least
security concern, all code must be studied (and recompiled) before it
is allowed to run.

Any government administrators who don't understand  this  are  simply
incompetent, and should be replaced with people who do understand the
issues better.

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