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(a)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
--
The difference between insanity and genius is measured by success