"Last October I blogged about our plan to release the source code to the .NET Framework libraries, and enable debugging support of them with Visual Studio 2008. Today I'm happy to announce that this is now available for everyone to use. Specifically, you can now browse and debug the source code for the following .NET Framework libraries."
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Member since:2005-07-06
Not to mention that MS would then expect a patent tax from everyone who based off of that code....
Speaking of which, it seems that Microsoft explicitly voids even the "read-only" part of the license if you're not developing for Windows.
"The .NET Framework source is being released under a read-only reference license. When we announced that we were releasing the source back in October, some people had concerns about the potential impact of their viewing the source. To help clarify and address these concerns, we made a small change to the license to specifically call out that the license does not apply to users developing software for a non-Windows platform that has 'the same or substantially the same features or functionality' as the .NET Framework. If the software you are developing is for Windows platforms, you can look at the code, even if that software has "the same or substantially the same features or functionality" as the .NET Framework."
So if you're writing something for a platform other than Windows, you're not allowed to look at the source. I guess this rules out people who write for two platforms simultaneously, as well.
This license is just oh so very useful.
Edited 2008-01-17 18:30 UTC
Member since:2006-01-26
So if you're writing something for a platform other than Windows, you're not allowed to look at the source. I guess this rules out people who write for two platforms simultaneously, as well.
Uh... I suspect you're reading that from a "conspiracy theorists" position.
I believe they're basically saying: If you're writing software that runs on Windows, you can view the source. But if you're writing software that doesn't run on Windows at all - go F yourself, you can't read our source. They don't care whether it's developed for Mono or whatever - as long as it runs on Windows.
If you think about it from that perspective - they just want to make sure that an end user of the software can choose to use Windows to run the software.
Member since:
2005-07-08
Even if it was GPL'ed, most of it would be useless to Mono developers. For example, they couldn't port MS's implementation of System.Windows.Forms because it's a huge wrapper around Windows native API (unless they would use part of Wine to achieve this).