.NET going open source(sort of)

[EA Durbin]

Looks like Microsoft is making their source code available for the .NET libraries. under their reference license.

http://www.whurley.com/blog/2007/10/opennet-microso.html
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[Kai Blin]

On Wednesday 03 October 2007 22:48:21 EA Durbin wrote:
> Looks like Microsoft is making their source code available for the .NET
> libraries. under their reference license.
>
> http://www.whurley.com/blog/2007/10/opennet-microso.html

IIRC the MS reference license is pretty useless for (L)GPL development. Can we 
get a statement from the FSF or SFLC on that?

Cheers,
Kai

[Steven Edwards]

On 10/3/07, Kai Blin  wrote:
> On Wednesday 03 October 2007 22:48:21 EA Durbin wrote:
> > Looks like Microsoft is making their source code available for the .NET
> > libraries. under their reference license.
> >
> > http://www.whurley.com/blog/2007/10/opennet-microso.html
>
> IIRC the MS reference license is pretty useless for (L)GPL development. Can we
> get a statement from the FSF or SFLC on that?

At Wineconf, we should compile a list of things to go over with the
SFLC. I'd like to have a discussion about this and other topics
including the concept of developer "taint" given the recent liberal
sharing of the Windows Research Kernel

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/Licensing/researchkernel.msp...

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/licensingbasics/wrklicense.m...

I have a few other topics in mind and will be putting together a short
PowerPoint on the subject if anyone is interested.

[Alexandre Julliard]

Kai Blin  writes:
> On Wednesday 03 October 2007 22:48:21 EA Durbin wrote:
> > Looks like Microsoft is making their source code available for the .NET
> > libraries. under their reference license.
> >
> > http://www.whurley.com/blog/2007/10/opennet-microso.html
>
> IIRC the MS reference license is pretty useless for (L)GPL development. Can we 
> get a statement from the FSF or SFLC on that?

The license doesn't allow redistribution or modifications, so it's
clearly completely useless for any kind of open source development.
Anybody who plans to work on implementing .NET support should stay far
away from that code.

[Steven Edwards]

On 10/4/07, Alexandre Julliard  wrote:
> The license doesn't allow redistribution or modifications, so it's
> clearly completely useless for any kind of open source development.
> Anybody who plans to work on implementing .NET support should stay far
> away from that code.

The problem is according to the pages I have seen .NET is going to
fall in to a MFC like case where it the sources will ship with MSVC to
aid in debugging, except you won't be able to redistribute as under
liberal terms. This means ever .NET developer in the world is going to
have seen the sources or at least had access to them. This sort of
situation and the sharing of the WRK sources leads me to think we need
to get some sort of position statement from the SFLC.

To provide an example of what I mean, lets say I looked at the rooter
source code when then they published the .NET CLR sources for the BSD
under a psudo-bsdish license. Am I bound by the terms of that license
to implement any code I write for mono or Wine even though I don't
remember any of it? Should the policy really be, if you've ever seen a
similar source code, you can't implement it? This makes sense except
with the rampant proliferation of what I call MS-FOSS licenses, soon
everyone and their uncles will be able to at least view read-only most
of the Windows source code.

Thanks