Facing banishment from governments such as Peru, Taiwan, Argentina, Spain, France, and Mexico, Microsoft has offered to reveal its source code to governments who demand to see it. The concern, on the part of these governments, is that they can't trust what the software is actually doing, and that state secrets aren't being compromised.

Previously, Microsoft has been shown to engage in a number of "dirty tricks" such as shipping misleading beta versions to companies they wanted to destroy and altering their operating system to disable competing products. Given this history, I don't know how a government could inspect a body of source code and have any confidence that code was the exact code version used to build their software, and not a "santized" version.

Comments and suggestions welcomed.