Oooh, what's this? Could there actually be a sudden influx of real drama in "Redmond Justice"? After all, the show's been on the air for four seasons, now, and pretty much any show that survives that long starts to wear a little thin. (Cough.) Gone are those pulse-quickening days when Microsoft got caught faking evidence, or when Bill Gates professed not to understand the meaning of the word "we"; in recent seasons, fans of the show have been forced to make do with nothing more thrilling than duelling legal briefs and quibbles over whether a hearing is going to take place in March or April. Bestill our pounding hearts.

But suddenly things have just gotten a bit more interesting: faithful viewer Daniel Blanken nudged us towards a Reuters article which reveals that Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly may have Microsoft's lawyers contemplating a quick change of undergarments. [By the way: note the poll on that page.] Once the feds changed hands, the Justice Department may have gotten all cuddly and eager to settle, but the attorneys general still have their teeth filed into sharp points; it seems that, in light of the sanction hearings slated to commence next month, the nine states still involved with the case had the audacity to request a peek at Microsoft's crown jewels-- the source code to Windows itself.

This is, of course, the same source code that Microsoft has always protected with its very life, claiming that if any mortal non-Redmond eyes should ever glimpse it, the sky will become black as sackcloth, the moon will become as blood, and big, hairless apes will leap, howl, and sweat profusely before the masses. (Er, about that last one-- we can only assume that somebody must have spied a line or two at some point.) Given how touchy Microsoft has been on this subject from the beginning, frankly, we never for a second expected that the judge would even begin to contemplate the merest possibility of approving the states' outrageous request. But approve it she did: "It seems to me that if your side has access to it, then the other side, frankly, should have access to it," she said.

Now, don't get too excited, there, Buckaroo; we've gotten plenty of frothing email from people who didn't read closely enough and leapt to the startling conclusion that Microsoft has been ordered to make Windows open source, and that just ain't so-- well, so far. All the judge has done is order that Microsoft turn the source code over to the states for the purposes of exploring Microsoft's continued assertion that Internet Explorer is an unremovable part of Windows, and not just an application that's been merged as much as possible for no reason other than to bolster a legal defense strategy. However, if the judge was willing to make Microsoft fork its code over to the plaintiffs, that might signal that she wouldn't be overly averse to approving some sort of forced licensing of said code as part of the sanctions against Bill's brigade. Consider it an interesting first step-- and stay tuned.