I was able to spend some time recently with Jon Rosenberg, our Director of Shared Source programs at Microsoft. 

Shared Source is essentially an unmbrella initiative through which we share a lot of our most valuable IP with not just Public Sector customers, but also the broader developer community.

Jon covered a lot of ground, but a couple of the things I wanted to highlight were:

• Our Shared Source Licenses - a lot of what we release ourselves are released under one of the Licenses we got developed internally.  The licenses are simple to understand, and any organization that wants to use them on one of their own projects should feel free to do so.
• Connected with Licensing, a site that we recently launched - http://codeplex.com - is somewhere that you can see the liceneses come to life through some of the cool MS technology-based projects that are hosted there.

Enjoy!

Jonny Chambers