
"One of the things my team has been working to enable has been the ability for .NET developers to download and browse the source code of the .NET Framework libraries, and to easily enable debugging support in them. Today I'm excited to announce that we'll be
providing this with the .NET 3.5 and VS 2008 release later this year. We'll begin by offering the source code (with source file comments included) for the .NET Base Class Libraries, ASP.NET, Windows Forms, ADO.NET, XML, and WPF. We'll then be adding more libraries in the months ahead (including WCF, Workflow, and LINQ). The source code will be released under the
Microsoft Reference License."
Member since:
2006-06-21
So what if you look at the code? In most parts of the world the only problem is copyright, and it's not an issue unless you copy and paste the code. Or, to make absolutely sure, you use "clean room" development, where one developer looks at the original code, tells another what it does and the second developer writes new code from scratch, with the same functionality.
Software patents or reverse engineering are an issue only in some countries.