Microsoft opened source codes of Windows for Chinese

Microsoft will provide to the Government of the People's Republic of China access to source codes of Windows 7 and other flagship products and systems: this measure the corporation hopes to dispel doubts of the country leaders in security of the specified software.

It provisions is expansion of terms of agreement, signed by the parties in 2006. As a result China will have access to the following products: Windows 7 Windows Vista Windows XP, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2003 and version 2000 and also Windows CE all latests version, since 4.2. Also Microsoft Office source code 2003 Professional Edition and some other software products of corporation is open for China.

Agreement signature followed at once a series of an interview of the head of corporation Steve Ballmer in which he spoke about decrease in the importance of the Chinese market for Microsoft because of the weakened IP security and to growth of a priority of the Indian market.

"China is such transcendental object: there is no market of software about which it would be possible to speak seriously. China less interesting market for us than, for example, India or Indonesia", - the head of the company said in an interview to Bloomberg. "Not that we are not engaged in the Chinese market at all, but in terms of perspectives we do more in the market of India and Korea", - Ballmer added.

Though the Chinese authorities forced such large producer of the PC as Lenovo to supply all equipment without fail with copies of Windows, the situation with software of Microsoft in this country in fact remains ambiguous. In 2009 in the People's Republic of China 40 million PCs were sold, it is the world's largest market, but still in revenue of Microsoft it occupies only 1%. All Asia, except for Japan, - only 3%.

Providing the country of an opportunity to the government to study the source code of software should increase as a result trust of officials to products of Microsoft and bring to life a series real the world on sales increase of software of the company which is provided by the agreement. Meanwhile, the government of China remains the largest consumer of IT services of the country.

Let's remind that the program of Microsoft providing access to the source codes Microsoft Windows for the national governments was announced in 2003. Then in the official statement of corporation it was said that it is a non-paid initiative which will allow participants of the program to study the source code of the key systems they could be used with the maximum degree of security.