Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft announced that it will now offer access to its proprietary source code for Outlook, Microsoft Word and Excel. The offer was extended to more than 60 international organizations, the company said, many of which have already had access to the code for the Microsoft operating system.
Out of those chosen 60 government-based organizations, Microsoft says that an estimated 30 have agreed to sign a free license agreement, including organizations in Russian, the United Kingdom, China and Norway.
The offer comes as open source operating system Linux is slowly beginning to upseat Microsoft's dominance over the software market and is quickly converting corporations and government organizations to less expensive open source options.
Microsoft also suffered a major setback to the popularity of its operating system and software products from crippling virus and worm attacks that have successfully managed to exploit weaknesses in Microsoft products.
Microsoft was also heavily criticized earlier this year for failing to release security patches in a timely manner during some of the more destructive virus outbreaks in recent history.