Windows CE 6 Arrives Complete with Kernel Source

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has launched the sixth edition of their embedded OS Windows CE and this time has included the full source. From the article: 'Developers can now access shared source code for the Windows CE kernel -- as well as certain device drivers and application-level components -- directly from within the Windows Embedded CE 6.0 distribution package. To do this, they click on a function in the IDE that installs the shared source, and indicate their acceptance of the associated shared source license.'"

Re:License details?

[Jugalator]

I'm not sure which of their three shared source licenses it's released under, but it should be one or more (sometimes they dual-license stuff, as with the Windows Template Library) of the three listed here [microsoft.com]. I think the article just called them "shared source" so I can't tell from that one anyway.

microsoft open source projects

[sentientbrendan]

At this point in time there have been a number of projects from microsoft that have released their sources under some license or another. Some of them have been true open source licenses, and remarkably those have been hosted on sourceforge along with all the other oss stuff. I'll list the few I know about here and maybe others can mention a few.

Wix:
A toolset for building installer packages on windows. Supposedly one of the better ones.
license: cpl
http://wix.sourceforge.net/index.html [sourceforge.net]

WTL:
An extension to the ATL. Probably the best toolkit for developing win32 guis in c++ (lightweight and powerful). It's hampered by the fact that documentation for it is scatered around the net (mostly on the code project) and so mostly people usually end up learning about it by reading through the largely uncommented source.
license: cpl (alternately available under a different, maybe equiavent license if downloaded from microsofts site)
http://wtl.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

Rotor:
A cross platform implementation of the .NET runtime developed by microsoft. Runs on windows and BSD I believe, and has been ported to linux by third parties. I don't believe it includes the .NET framework, and is more designed as a reference implementation of "how to get .NET working on other platforms" than anything else.
License: shared source
http://research.microsoft.com/programs/europe/roto r/ [microsoft.com]

Windows CE:
Mentioned in article. I think they release it under this license for custimization and debuggin purposes.
License: shared source
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/Li censing/WindowsCE.mspx [microsoft.com]

Licenses:
So far microsoft seems to use the shared source license and the CPL license.

The shared source license is relatively restrictive, and generally leaves microsoft with most of the power over issues of reditribution and use of source. Shared source seems to be largely used to distribute code for educational, debugging, and customization uses.

The CPL is a full blown open source/free software license that was actually written by IBM and I believe is the license that eclipse is distributed under (only under a different name). Community projects like Wix and WTL are being handled under this license.

My impression from talking to microsoft guys and from working there briefly is that the antipathy felt towards linux and open source is not particularly pervasive in the company. I've met a few people who had negative misconceptions about open source, but whatever the average slashdotter might think microsoft tends to hire smart people who are aware of industry trends and best practices including oss.