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Microsoft said on Friday that that a tool that makes it simpler to load Windows 7 on a Netbook contains open-source code.
"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," Microsoft's Peter Galli said.
"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. We have furthermore conducted a review of other code provided through the Microsoft Store and this was the only incident of this sort we could find.”
Microsoft has said the source code for the tool and the binaries under the terms of the General Public License (GPL v2) will be made available next week. It will also make the tool available at the Microsoft store.
Microsoft had pulled the software utility down earlier this week after blogger Rafael Rivera said in a posting that the tool appeared to use code from the open source ImageMaster project. That project is no longer available on CodePlex now, where it had been posted.
The Windows USB/DVD Tool was Microsoft's response to a difficult problem - upgrading the operating system on Netbooks and other PCs without an optical drive.
Microsoft had been investigating different methods to handle the issue, finally settling on this software program, released last month, which allows users take a downloadable copy of the operating system and create a bootable drive.
Releasing software under an open-source license is nothing new to Microsoft, although the company characteristically doesn't do so under the GPL, which it perceives as one of the more limiting open-source licenses.
