But the prime reason is security. If its source code were made public, it might be easier for hackers to find vulnerabilities and exploit them
Who says this is the prime reason? I highly, highly doubt this is anything close to the prime reason. Open source advocates go nuts talking about how security through obscurity isn't security at all and considering how many vulnerabilities are found by researchers who have 0 access to source code, one has to believe them.
I'm sure the other reasons you listed are far more important a factor to MS.
Open source certainly hasn?t harmed Linux? success
Well that depends on your definition of "success". MS's definition is billions of dollars of profits from the sale of an OS. While Linux has seen success in other areas, no one has made billions of dollars selling Linux as an OS. They've made money selling services or selling hardware that has Linux on it but very little money has ever been made selling Linux itself.
doing so would at least put American IT operators on a level playing field with the Russian secret service
Why, so that American IT operators could scour source code and fix security vulnerabilities themselves? It would be very interesting to see stats on how many Linux using businesses ever change a single line of Linux code or even look at a single line of Linux code.
Do you think giving the Russian secret service access to Windows source puts America at a severe security disadvantage?
Only if you think that having source code is a requirement to breaking into a computer. The truth is that it isn't.
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