Microsoft's approach to software development may seem at odds with Open Source goals, but for those engaged in the company's Shared Source initiative, there is more common ground than you might think. For the past five years, Microsoft has been steadily increasing its connections with the open development community through active participation in dozens of projects on SourceForge.net. In this talk, Jason Matusow explains how the world's biggest proprietary software house has been striking the balance between community and commercialization in its efforts to engage developers, solve customer problems, and create new opportunities through more flexible licensing.

Microsoft's primary motivation is to sell commercial software, and as such, its relationship with the Open Source movement has not always been easy. Given the legitimate goal of protecting its intellectual property, how can the idea of giving away source code fit into the company's strategy? Established in 2001, the Shared Source program was ridiculed by some as disingenuous, and welcomed by others as a fresh wind. Matusow explains that the program's goals are partly to help Microsoft understand the place for Open Source in its business, and partly to support the shared interests of the developer community world-wide. Microsoft has now contributed to over 80 releases on SourceForge.net which allow anyone to read, modify and redistribute code. The company's activities extend to hundreds of other projects, and touch millions of developers. Matusow analyzes several interesting examples and lessons learned from successful open projects, both internal and external to the company.

How has the Shared Source experiment been going? Under the right circumstances, open development models can solve problems, squash bugs, promote best practices, and stimulate collaboration and innovation. Open design also promotes a modular architecture which can enable the rapid contribution of multiple developers to a problem. On the other hand, commercialization does decrease the capacity for openness in some ways. For example, customers often depend on the predictability of software, so opening the code to change can threaten its value. Licensing is a thorny problem faced by developers in both the free and proprietary spaces. The proliferation of numerous terms and conditions is causing great confusion. Microsoft is working to manage this complexity by releasing products under one of three models: a Permissive License comparable to BSD; a Community License comparable to Mozilla; and a more closed, Reference License to share code with MS developers.