How want the code and why (Score -1)

Source : http://www.zdnetindia.com/techzone/coding/stories/ 66702.html Microsoft's shared source chief Jason Matusow talks about whether the company plans to release more Office source code. The question is, does anybody want it? As program manager of the Shared Source Initiative at Microsoft, Jason Matusow is responsible for coordinating Microsoft's global source licensing strategy. ZDNet UK caught up with him to talk about Microsoft's long-term plans. Q: Just over a year ago, Microsoft senior vice president Craig Mundie made his infamous comments about open source. Since then, Microsoft has been rolling out its Shared Source Initiative. How do you rationalize your Shared Source Initiative with Microsoft's views on open source? A: One unfortunate thing we did was coming out against open source--we knew it would be controversial. There is a longstanding industry debate around source code and what role it plays. IT professionals have one point of view, developers have another, business decision makers have yet another and then hobbyists come at it from an entirely different direction again. For a long time we were held up as being anti-open source. But the idea of Shared Source came about because of customers telling us: "I am able to do some things in open source because I have access to the source code, and I would like to be able to do the same thing with your code." The fact is that Linux is now competing with Windows. That is good because it is spurring us on and making us compete better, but equally, it is difficult for us to say Windows has better management tools than Linux because all of a sudden people say we are attacking open source. We now share Windows, some of Windows CE and parts of .Net -- our implementations of the C# CLI (Common Language Infrastructure) specification. When you say Shared Source, what do you mean exactly? Different groups with Microsoft have very different businesses; Windows is a very different product to Golf, for instance. The Windows program is a reference-only license. So in the Windows team today we let you view the code and debug against it, but you can't change the code. So if you're building your own application that sits on Windows you can debug the applications and Windows code in the relevant APIs (application programming interfaces). This also means you can trace back issues and have them fixed. It helps in deployment engineering where someone is rolling out applications that sit on Windows, which in turn is sitting on hardware. And it helps with security audits--nobody will be doing an end-to-end audit of Windows but you can audit components that interface with your security application. But we are committed to the integrity of the platform: we will not allow derivatives of the source code.