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Microsoft's code sharing offer draws a blank
By BS Corporate Bureau in New Delhi
September 30, 2003 08:59 IST

The world's largest software company Microsoft Corporation said on Monday that it has made an offer to the India to share the source code of some of its programmes and it is yet to hear from the government on it.

As per the programme source code sharing programme, Microsoft shares the source code of its key software technologies with the government and allows it to undertake evaluation of security as well as other aspects of it. The Centre sometime back had shown interest in access to source codes of various Microsoft products.

Craig Mundie, chief technology officer and senior vice-president advanced strategies and policy, Microsoft Corporation also said the company is going ahead with the source code sharing programme despite the recent virus attacks targeting its products.

"When we enter into a source code sharing programme we have strict confidentiality clauses. We do not expect it to lead to security breaches," Mundie said.

According to him, over 90 per cent of security breaches on various Microsoft products can be traced back to work undertaken by the third party software vendors that the company work with in software product development.

He said the company has taken a massive exercise to incorporate security as a key of all products of Microsoft. Microsoft on Monday also launched project 'Bhasha' to accelerate local language computing.

As a part of the project, Microsoft will focus on product localisation, government ties, academia developer integration and building a local language eco-system.
BS Corporate Bureau in New Delhi
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