In a blog post today, the Windows 7 team announced that the official Windows 7 Release Candidate version will be released on April 30th to its MSDN [Microsoft Software Developers Network] and TechNet subscribers. Continuing with its newly-found policy of openness to general public, the company will publicly release the Windows 7 RC on May 5th.
If you are testing a beta version of Win7 on your computer and you want to keep testing the pre-release versions of Windows 7 for free, you should probably take the RC for a ride. According to publicly released statements, the Windows team is continuously working hard on bug fixes and changes and analyzing the received feedback - according to Microsoft, the dev team receives a "Send Feedback" report every 15 seconds.
For those who don’t want to wait till May 5th don’t worry - according to reports we received this morning, a copy of Windows 7 RC showed up on several torrent sites such as Mininova and The Pirate Bay.
Now, the question that is probably on everyone's mind would be will Microsoft dare to actually release its software through a torrent network? Our sources are telling us that the company underwent a significant change of attitude after Ray Ozzie took over the reign [unlike conventional corporations, Chief Software Architect is de facto the man in charge in Microsoft] and to quote one anonymous Microsoft employee: "Even pigs can fly in Redmond now".
We'll see whether the company really has reasons to be happy after lackluster financial petrformance in Q2.
