Get Source

Get Source

As a result of the ongoing success of the Microsoft Government Security Program (GSP) and positive feedback from governmental entities, Microsoft announced it will offer access to the source code of its flagship desktop offering, Microsoft Office 2003, as part of the GSP. Building on the existing GSP Windows® source offering and the availability of Microsoft Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas announced last year, the Government Shared Source License for Office gives qualifying national governments and international organizations access to source code and technical information about Office 2003. 

Open Source... Shared Source.... Let's all party, MS has released the source to all...

Give it to one, it is there for all...

So now what argument will the ./ Crowd make?

From my myopic perspective I can only say MS has BIG COJONES to do this.

It will be interesting to see what happens with this. Maybe this will open the doors down the road to do something like this again.

Benefits

Access to Microsoft source code through the ESLP benefits enterprise customers by:

• Providing insight and a deeper understanding of Windows.
• Facilitating security and privacy audits and maintenance of customer's computing environment.
• Enhancing performance tuning, thereby allowing customers to adjust and optimize their own systems and related applications.
• Enhancing the pre-deployment engineering process for enterprise environments.
• Improving internal support and troubleshooting capabilities of deployed Windows systems.
• Improving the feedback mechanisms that ultimately contribute to the development of better Microsoft customer solutions and tools for the future.

ManicKernel, the argument that all OSS advocates will make is that reviewing 'shared source' source code will seriously damage your ability to work on OSS. Oh and that Shared Source is not the same as Open Source

You have been able to download the source for Windows 2k on the net for ages.. like from here

Rossj wrote:

ManicKernel, the argument that all OSS advocates will make is that reviewing 'shared source' source code will seriously damage your ability to work on OSS. Oh and that Shared Source is not the same as Open Source

If you are writing programs that run on Windows you need the "hooks" that Windows Source will show you.