Why Microsoft should reveal SQL Server code
John Carroll thinks that anyone with a valid license should have access to Microsoft's SQL Server source code. Rather than a polemic against proprietary software, John makes a practical argument and commends Microsoft's steps to release more source code...
Why would I find that [access to the source code] useful? It's NOT because I want to make a derivative variant of SQL Server. I could care less about database development, not because there isn't anything interesting in it, but because I have 80,000 other programming responsibilities which take precedence over worrying about the proper way to write a database. Division of Labor is a good thing, and I've made the decision that my time is not best spent worrying about writing a database.
Rather, I want to debug my own code with access to SQL Server source code. That's extremely useful. If something unexpected happens, whether catastrophic or just weird, I can dive into the code to figure out what instructions were executed. This is better than trying to untangle assembly language, which is God's way of saying you have no life.
Access to source code also makes things more predictable. When I make a call into SQL Server, I