This soft-sell approach is a long way from a few years ago, when fire-breathing Microsoft executives, including Ballmer himself, compared open source to "cancer" and the open source community to Communists.
But Microsoft still wants you to buy its software, rather than open source.
Ballmer said Microsoft's approach to integrating applications and operating system leads to lower cost of ownership and less complexity, while not blocking users from using other vendors' technologies. And he said the open source development model, which allows "every Tom, Dick and Harry" to contribute, makes it hard to figure out whether other people's intellectual property are being wrongfully submitted to open source.
Matusow said opening WiX source code is part of of an effort by Microsoft to apply the open source process to its own business. He said many proprietary vendors are doing the same thing. Apple combined FreeBSD and its proprietary Macintosh operating system to create its current OS X. IBM aggressively supports Linux while continuing to have a $14 billion proprietary software business, including the DB2 database, and Tivoli systems management software.
Microsoft's own Shared Source program is designed mainly to allow developers to examine Microsoft source code for security and compatibility, Matusow said.
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