Shared Source and Open Solutions: An e-Government Perspective

Overview

Over the past four years, increasing commercialisation has been a significant influence on free and open source software. At the same time, the community based collaborative development model, which generally connotes open source, has also been studied and adopted by traditional software companies. These trends have led to an understanding that what separates open source from other software development approaches is the licensing model rather than the development model. Despite this, the two paradigms are rapidly starting to look very similar as open source is increasingly commercialised and established software companies integrate community based development into their value chain. This paper presents Microsoft's experience with its Intellectual Property Sharing programs and Shared Source Initiative.