Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative, which makes its software source code accessible to governments, partners, academics and corporates, has signed up one million participants.

The initiative was created in May 2001 to allow access to Microsoft technologies ranging from .Net to embedded operating systems.

Craig Mundie, the company's chief technology officer and senior vice president for advanced strategies and policy, said in a statement: "We are continually adding new source code offerings to Shared Source.

"Crossing the one million participants mark confirms that we're delivering value to the community."

Over the past three years, the initiative has grown to include more development and infrastructure technologies, most of which are licensed to allow developers to see, modify and redistribute changes to the source code.

As a participant in the Windows Enterprise Source Licensing Programme, Swiss-based financial services company UBS AG has access to source code for all released versions, service packs and betas of Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 code base.

Boris Basura, a systems engineer and associate director at UBS, said: "Much of our work involves debugging applications. Sometimes it is difficult to find the bug, or you have a strange behaviour and you don't know where it comes from.

"It saves a lot of time if you can reference the source code to find out what the issue is. Otherwise, you would spend time in trial and error before you found the answer."