Microsoft Posts First Source Code Under Open Source License

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April 06, 2004 (10:24 AM EDT)

Microsoft Posts First Source Code Under Open Source License

Hard on the heels of Friday's shocking detente with Sun, Microsoft on Monday pulled another surprise: it posted source code under the Open Source Initiative's Common Public License.

The source code posted to the Internet was for a tool set, dubbed WiX for Windows Installer XML, that targets developers building Windows installation packages from XML source code. These are the same tools that Microsoft uses internally to create installers for its products, including Office, SQLServer, and BizTalk Server.

Code for the tool set, which consists of a compiler, linker, a library tool, and a decompiler, has been posted to SourceForge.net, a hosting site for open-source projects and code.

This is the first time that Microsoft has posted source code under the Common Public License (CPL), one of several supported by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). CPL allows developers to modify the code and use it in commercial products.

In the past, the closest to open source that Microsoft has come was its Shared Source Licensing programs, under which it makes sections of its Windows source code available to preferred partners and governments.

In his posting to SourceForge.net, Microsoft employee Rob Mensching explained why Microsoft released the WiX source code under the CPL. "WiX is a very developer oriented project and thus providing source code access increases the pool of available developers," said Mensching on his Microsoft Developers Network Web site. "Back in 1999 and 2000, I did not feel that many people inside Microsoft understood what the Open Source community was really about and I wanted to improve that understanding by providing an example."

The source code for WiX can be found on the SourceForge.net site.