.NET going open source(sort of)

[Steven Edwards]

On 10/4/07, Alexandre Julliard <julliard at winehq.org> 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

-- 
Steven Edwards

"There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and
that is an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo