Microsoft is slashing the number of licenses it will use for its Shared Source Initiative from now on, while at the same time radically shortening and simplifying the text of those licenses. The move, which will be announced on Wednesday morning at Oscon, the O'Reilly European Open Source Convention in Amsterdam, will see Microsoft cutting back the more than 10 Shared Source licenses that currently exist to only three template, or core, licenses.
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Member since:2005-07-12
Actually, clean-room reverse engineering is still quite possible. You just have to be able to prove that you've never seen the released specifications.
You're right, though, that IP-encumbered source code can become a legal minefield quite quickly. One look at MS's code, and your ability to write free software in that area could well be greatly diminished...
Member since:2005-07-06
I highly doubt this might be the case. Reverse engineering is used to access information which are not disclosed. If you disclose such information, people using such information only need to implement their code in a different way than original developer did.
If there's only one way to perform an operation (think about matemathical processes), that code is clearly not patentable. And that's it.
Do you have any information or can you give more details to back such statements up?
I think you cast doubts which aren't true. However, if you're sure about it can you give me (and us) more details which can prove your point?
Member since:
Gervase Markham, a Mozilla hacker had just blogged about this http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/gerv/archives/2005/10/microsoft_anno...
My comments where "What this (and the "open"XML formats) might be about is making reverse engineering moot. You can't reverse engineer a file format (or source code) when it's made freely available - and thus you're not protected under law and fall into the licensing model which prevents you using the fileformat/code through its restrictions. "Open" Source MS Software might be 10x worse than the closed stuff"