News

Windows Source Code Opened to More

By Nate Mook | Published March 21, 2005, 11:42 AM

Microsoft has expanded its Shared Source Initiative to seven additional European Union Countries, opening up the Windows source code to more businesses, OEMs, MVPs and academic institutions. Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Slovakia and Slovenia have joined the program, which shares Windows 2000, XP, CE and Windows Server 2003 code.

"Transparency leads to greater trust and opportunity," said Jason Matusow, director of the Shared Source Initiative at Microsoft. "Over the past four years we have constantly looked for ways to expand the Shared Source Initiative - across technologies, licence types and geographies to better listen to what our customers and partners are asking of us."

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DiGiTaLFX
Mar 21, 2005 - 1:09 PM

Make windows open source! That'd expand it a bit.

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iamtux
Mar 21, 2005 - 1:47 PM

There's a step in the right direction for MSFT. Though I can't agree completely with making Windows open source. It would be an enormous contribution to the open-source community, but it would be the downfall of MSFT in the end, I believe. People would refuse to buy it anymore. Why would MSFT put themselves out of business?

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dbarjim
Mar 21, 2005 - 2:27 PM

This is the wrong direction. Putting their source code to their products makes it easier for groups of people to steal their products just as Movies and Songs are being stolen today without Royalties being paid to the people that made them. Just my ideas on giving the source code to everyone. I would not expect Oracle or IBM to make all their source codes for their applications open to the world???

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shortasslabrat
Mar 22, 2005 - 1:30 PM

Erm, you must live in a metal box on the moon to think that closing Windows source makes it hard(er) to copy and distribute. The underground market is already saturated with pirate copies of Windows - making it open source wouldn't change that in the slightest.

I'm not even going to get into the fact that Novell make a fortune from Linux and that's completely open source.

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shortasslabrat
Mar 22, 2005 - 1:32 PM

Oh and comparing open source to data files which have royalties attached (music files in your example) isn't even a logical comparisson!

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