Microsoft president Steve Ballmer, addressing developers at his closing keynote address at the Business Applications Conference in Las Vegas, said that the release of Windows NT 5.0 was "eight to twelve months away," placing it the second half of 1999. Give Microsoft's typical understating of delivery times, I think it's safe to say we're looking at a late 1999 or even early 2000 release of the oft-delayed operating system.
Answering the call of open source software pioneered by Linux and Netscape Communicator 5.0, Ballmer said that more of the Windows NT source code would be made available to developers.
"There is a real customer desire there," said Ballmer, though he warned that not all of the 40 million lines of code in NT 5.0 would be made available publicly
