Microsoft Office Home And Student 2010 blog open-s

The Shared Source Initiative can make publicly offered the source code for a large number of of Microsoft’s core products, including Windows and Office. And the company’s okay with that.

By Steve Birge

Believe it or not, there are non-Microsoft people digging into the kernel source code for Windows, Office, and other prized corporate assets.

Before you start to worry too much, the company knows about it and, in fact, encourages it. Don’t think the company has gone all open supply on you. It’s part of the Shared Supply Initiative (SSI),Office 2010 Professional Key, whereby almost anyone – including customers, partners, developers, academics, and governments worldwide – can access and work with actual supply code of a lot of Microsoft technologies.

Since 2002, more than 80 technologies have been made offered through the SSI, including a set of .NET framework libraries just released for sharing in mid-January. Additionally, more than 600 non-Microsoft technologies have been released under a Shared Supply license.

So why would Microsoft put the central workings of its primary products out into the world for anyone,Windows 7 License, including competitors, to see and manipulate? In reality,Office Professional, no critical secrets are revealed, and it winds up being beneficial in quite a few ways,Office Standard 2007, said Shawn Burke, a director in DevDiv’s.NET Development Platform organization, who opened the .NET libraries last month.

“There are quite a bit of good effects from sharing source,” Burke said. “The developers are happier because they can have less reliance on documentation and product support. Customers are happier because the applications that developers create work better. And the bottom line is I want to make our customers more successful with our platform.”

The SSI breaks down into three pillars, each with a particular audience and purpose.

Product Source Programs
Supply code for Windows, Office, and Windows Embedded CE is offered to qualifying customers, partners, and government agencies. Partners and enterprise developers can use the code to better develop and debug applications to run on these platforms. Government agencies from countries around the world have used code from SSI agreements to address security concerns in their digital environments.

Another component of this pillar is the Windows Academic Program, which provides Windows core code to university faculty and students. “Students learn an operating system with a real-world, proven example,” said Brad Miller, business program manager in Supply Asset Management. “They get a better understanding of Windows architecture and implementation, and they also can work with a project environment where they get to experiment with modifying the actual Windows kernel.”

Reference Supply Service
The Reference Source Code Center (RSCC), launched January 17 with Burke’s .NET components, provides the developer community with access to reference supply code and debug capabilities against core Microsoft platform technologies. The debugger in Visual Studio 2008 can be configured to dynamically download symbols and supply code of the selected platform component. An entry in Burke’s blog gives a step-by-step how-to. “This is another step forward in our ongoing commitment to provide more transparency to the developer community,” Burke said. “Developers will be able to code more innovative and secure applications on Microsoft platforms,Microsoft Office Home And Student 2010, because having access to the platform code running beneath applications will give them better understanding of how to design for those platforms.”

Community Source
If there is an area at Microsoft that comes close to open source, this is it. Active projects by employees and others are stored on a public hosting site called Codeplex, where the developer community can collaborate with the project originators toward completion of the project, or customize the supply code to meet their individual needs or those of their customers. This pillar has gone from no projects posted in June 2007 to more than 250 projects on Codeplex today, involving several Microsoft technologies, Miller said.

“I know customers are super excited to get access to supply,” Burke said. “It’s something they’ve wanted for a long time, and some of them frankly were a little surprised that we actually did it.”