The judge in the Micro$oft anti-trust case has told the software monopoly that it must hand over the source code to Windows to lawyers for the nine US states that have declined to accept the Federally-brokered settlement.
The states are seeking to require M$ to strip out various tools from the Windows OS so that competitors can offer their own “plug-ins” for those features. M$ claims this is impossible, that all these tools are integral parts of the OS. So, says US District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, prove it.
The scary thing is that M$, which is infamous for its tangled, uncontrolled Gordian Knot of code (which leads, in turn, to obscure crashes and security holes) may actually be right. Certainly there’s no sign that M$ has ever approached software in a modular fashion.
Still, the judge’s call is a fair one. It should be entertaining to see what happens next.
(Via Sekimori)