ZDNet (UK) interviewed Jason Matusow, program manager of the Shared Source Initiative at Microsoft. Matusow offers insight into why Microsoft decided to open up some of its source code, and explains what is meant by 'Shared Source', who can gain access to it (and how they do that), how much source is available for various Microsoft OSes (including CE .NET), and what additional applications and tools the… program will likely encompass . . .

“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.' . . .”

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