Microsoft goes Opensource

April 2004

Will Monday, 5 April 2004, be celebrated as the day Microsoft began turning into an open source company?

At first sight, the Windows Installer XML (WiX) toolset released then is just the latest piece of software distributed under Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative. This is the company's increasingly complex attempt to steal some of open source's thunder by offering classes of users degrees of access to the underlying code - mostly to look at, but in certain circumstances to touch, too.

Microsoft's nervousness about letting others see its source can be judged by the plethora of different licensing schemes now available. It is also reflected in the low- key description of the "WiX Shared Source Licensing Program". It is only when you follow the link to the SourceForge page where the project is hosted that you discover that WiX is being released under a licence that is fully approved by the Open Source Initiative. In other words, WiX is Microsoft's first open source code.

The background to this historic moment is sketched by the software's principal author, Rob Mensching. That he does so in a blog is hardly surprising these days; that he is one of more than 150 fellow Microsoft employees who not only create blogs but are allowed to share them with the world is rather more amazing.

Another of those blogs gives an insight into why Microsoft is opening up. It relates the company's new-found interest in blogging to concerns about "software quality" and the "customer connection." These are precisely the areas where free software excels, thanks to the tight links between coders and users that lie at the heart of the open source development model - and that people at Microsoft are trying to replicate through its official Shared Source Initiative as well as more informal approaches like blogs and Wikis, the latter mostly part of the interesting Channel 9 project.