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Open source, shared source or secret sauce?

Peter Judge ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 20 Sep 2002 08:19 BST

Eighteen months ago, Microsoft opened up its source code to large organisations. After years of pressure from the open-source movement, it gave 2,300 companies the chance to see the innermost secrets of the Windows operating system. But, says Microsoft, only 150 wanted to look.

Shared source is a big PR win for Microsoft. If it flops, as with Windows, it can say its instinct to keep the code to itself was vindicated. "One of the great myths of open source is that everyone wants to look at source code," said Jason Matusow, shared source manager at Microsoft. "We have approached many hundreds (of companies), but most have turned us down. Most say 'we are manufacturers, we don't do source code -- that's your job', and others say they expect their systems integrators to deal with any source code issues."

And if it goes the other way -- for example, a popular initiative to share some source code for Windows CE -- Microsoft still comes up smelling of roses. The company is seen to have responded to a real demand.

All well and good. Microsoft is entitled to draw its own conclusions from its shared source initiative, and it has the political skill to make capital out of it.

But in the long term, there are lots more things to be said. In the end, the open-source community will thank Microsoft for pushing the debate on. Let's face it, the polarisation of the debate can get pretty sterile -- it's all too easy to apply the usual clichés of Open-Source-Good and Microsoft-Evil.

The Shared Source Initiative lets certain users see 90 percent of the code in Windows -- accessing it from a server in Redmond, protected by smart-card security. To qualify, you have to be a large systems integrator, a government, a university, or a business with more than 1500 Windows users under Microsoft's Enterprise Agreement licence scheme.

It's not an open-source licence by any stretch. Users can't modify the code and create their own products based on it, as with the Linux open-source licences -- frankly, it's hard to see Microsoft ever thinking that would be a good idea. The company keeps 10 percent of the code to itself -- this contains code belonging to third parties, cryptographic information and company competitive code. Again, that makes sense for Microsoft.