“Speaking at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in Los
Angeles Wednesday, Steve Ballmer said Microsoft might open up the
source code to its Windows 2000 operating system. Another Microsoft
executive, Brian Valentine, vice president in charge of Windows
operating systems, echoed this statement, saying the company is
looking at opening the code to the NT kernel.”
“Microsoft is in the midst of trying to unify the development
efforts of Windows 98 and NT into a single body of code that will
almost entirely do away with the original DOS code.”
“But despite years of taunting Microsoft for its proprietary
software, open source advocates are now questioning its open source
hints.”