At a time when banks are shedding IT roles by the dozen, it seems counter-intuitive that 83 per cent of the nation’s chief information officers should report they are confident about the future of their business to the extent that 45 per cent expect to hire IT staff in the first six months of the year. The question remains – is this a dead cat bounce?
Microsoft has admitted that a download utility it was providing to its customers was in violation of the GNU General Public Licence and promised to release the source as soon as possible.
Last Tuesday, iTWire reported that the company had taken the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool offline following allegations that there was code in it that appeared to be from ImageMaster, a GPL-licensed project.
The allegations were made by Rafael Rivera, a developer based in Hawaii.
Peter Galli who runs Port 25, a website which Microsoft uses to communicate with the open source community, said in a post on the site that the company had confirmed there was infringing code in WUDT, a free tool offered by Microsoft to enable customers to create bootable USB drives or DVD backup media from the electronic software edition of Windows 7 that is sold as an ISO image.
"After looking at the code in question, we are now able to confirm this was indeed the case, although it was not intentional on our part," Galli wrote.
"While we had contracted with a third party to create the tool, we share responsibility as we did not catch it as part of our code review process. We have furthermore conducted a review of other code provided through the Microsoft Store and this was the only incident of this sort we could find.
"When it comes to our attention that a Microsoft component contains third party code, our aim is to be respectful of the terms under which that code is being shared.
"As a result, we will be making the source code as well as binaries for this tool available next week under the terms of the General Public License v2 as described here, and are also taking measures to apply what we have learned from this experience for future code reviews we perform."
Michelle Thomas
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