Microsoft Store’s Windows 7 USB/DVD Tool To Go Open Source

Being the enthusiast that Rafael is, he discovered that the tool made available on Microsoft Store to make bootable DVDs & USB drives of the downloaded Windows 7 ISOs contained code that was under the GPL license, however Microsoft wasn’t offering the tool under the same license which meant that Microsoft was violating the license. Once the news spread, Microsoft removed the tool from the Microsoft Store website and decided to look into the matter. Today, Microsoft on their Open Source Community blog – Port 25 has confirmed that the tool was developed by a contractual 3rd party developer & did infact violate the license. While apologising for the same Microsoft has stated that they will be making the software code available under GPL v2.

From the blog post:

[…] 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. 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.

[…] 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

Quite a development.