If memory serves me right, Frederick Noronha wrote:
Interestingly, Microsoft's Tarun Anand also speaks on 'Shared Source: Implementation of .NET'.
Just a query, how does this concept of 'shared source' compare with GNU/Free Software or Open Source licences?
Some of the entries of the license like , derievative works should be only under a license including all this provisions of this License , remind me of the GPL's restrictions ....
But this is a sort of license to keep software on the wrong side of freedom...
|| You may use any information in intangible form that you remember after || accessing the Software.
Which means I can quote what happens inside .... but if I attempt to repeat it somewhere else (even from memory) in working form it is considered tangible and therefore a license violation ...
Sort of like "flashing proprietary code before a hacker and saying 'all your future code belongs to us !'" ... Which is my interpretation of this license.
IANAL, and so you should hear what a real lawyer says about this ... ( an FS lawyer too, someone who enforces GPL for the sake of all)
From: Eben Moglen moglen@columbia.edu Subject: [CoreTeam]Re: Microsoft Shared Source License and Portable.NET
Hi Rhys,
The key provision in the license is:
You may use any information in intangible form that you remember after accessing the Software. However, this right does not grant you a license to any of Microsoft's copyrights or patents for anything you might create using such information.
This is pretty clear (they're becoming rather good at drafting "shared source" licenses; I'm beginning to feel stylistically challenged). It means that they don't claim any right to control knowledge you may gain from reading their code, but you can't copy their code or practice any of their patent claims. The patent issue is unaffected by the reading of their code, from our point of view. On the copyright side, our responsibility is the same as it would be under any other circumstances: we must write all our code from scratch, copying nothing contained in their Rotor code. If there is no copying there is no infringement under their license.
My advice is to tell people to code where possible from the ECMA standard. Where (which is likely to be everywhere), ECMA is insufficiently descriptive to create interoperable code, it is acceptable to read the source of the Rotor implementation. Notes taken in the course of reading that source should be made in pseudocode, so that programmers do not copy snippets of the Rotor source as aides to their memory. We want every line of code in our projects to have come out of the original invention of one of our coders, having been expressed in his or her own way. Ideas abstracted from the Rotor implementation should always have been put in our programmer's own "words," because copyright protects expressions, not ideas.
This is somewhere in 2002 March in DotGNU mailing lists ... (hmmm... [coreteam] archives are private for obvious reasons, which i why quoted the entire mail...)
Some later discussions have happened this month about Rotor (Shared source CLI for *BSD) ... Read it here at http://dotgnu.org/pipermail/developers/2002-November/008669.html and follow the thread ...
Rotor is a perpetual license trap for somebody looking to contribute to Free Software communities ... But MS seems terribly fond of people using X11 licenses ... (there are free software giants who switched their entire libraries to X11 from LGPL to avoid MS hot-footing...)
If someone is thinking of doing some .NET development , please do try DotGNU Portable.Net ... It's part of the GNU project and IIRC is bundled in Mandrake CD 3 (the bundled version will prolly be outdated) ... Lend a hand ...
Gopal