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Suppose you are right and MS does want mono to be implemented and succeed in Linux, BSD, etc. Why? Out of the goodness of their hearts?!!

No, simply to promote the platform. For this same reason, Microsoft provides free and open source (yes, true Open Source) implementations of Python, Ruby and PHP for .NET that run on Mono; and F# supports Mono as well.

Suppose you are right and MS does want mono to be implemented and succeed in Linux, BSD, etc. Why? Out of the goodness of their hearts?!!

No, simply to promote the platform. For this same reason, Microsoft provides free and open source (yes, true Open Source) implementations of Python, Ruby and PHP for .NET that run on Mono; and F# supports Mono as well.

Don't worry, there is a way to target .NET 1.1 with VS 2005 and even with VS 2008.

So I have an open source project for silverlight and post on the silverlight forums. Paranoid just a bit? Get a life dude. What have you done for open source?

Written in LISP of course (ironically, not a .NET language)

But it is:

L#
IronScheme
Common Larceny

It's not nearly as fast though, and IIRC it's not a live preview. I used that for a while in XP, and then switched to TaskSwitchXP because it does nicer previews, and can refresh them at a specified rate, but even that's not live. In Vista, if you're playing a video in VLC or something on youtube, you can actually watch the video play while using alt-tab if you really wanted. That's not so useful by itself, but when applications are written using those APIs it becomes pretty useful. For example OnTopReplica lets you make an always-on-top glassified live preview window of any window you want, which is a pretty useful thing to have. As a side note, I find codeplex.com to be incredibly bizarre, "Microsoft's open source project hosting site" kind of screams "It's a trap" but I guess they're improving on that end too.

This can get you there...with a little work, and it's as cheap as it gets. http://www.codeplex.com/Poshboard/

http://www.codeplex.com/touchless/SourceControl/DirectoryView.aspx?SourcePath=&changeSetId=25142

That was very hard. I had to spend a whole 10 seconds searching the internet.

Now, burden of proof is on you: what is wrong with the source code, available there? Isn't this the basis of the OSS "many eyes" theory?

Actually STM is avaliable for .Net

http://www.codeplex.com/NetSTM

Full support for System.Transactions

They (Microsoft & The Press) never claimed Vista would be an entirely new codebase either. It was always going to be the next major release of the Windows NT OS, namely, version 6.0. They did claim that many fundamental system components would be rewritten or undergo significant changes, which they did. The NT kernel had numerous changes implemented, for instance, and so did many other low-level system components, e.g. the GUI subsystem. These aren't down to perspective, these are facts.

I doubt Windows 7 will be vapour, it will be released, the quality of the release remains to be seen, but calling it "vapor" is ridiculous. Further, just because it is based on the Vista codebase doesn't instantly relegate it to the status of garbage. The Vista internals are on the whole very stable, now that the large video/audio hardware makers seem to have smoothed out their driver issues and got to grips with the new driver model. Windows 7 is aimed at giving Vista the sandpaper treatment, smoothing out the rough edges. Whether it's successful I have no idea, but if it is, you'll be left with a pretty decent OS on the whole.

If you're after a legitimately entirely new codebase, I'd suggest you check out Singularity:
http://research.microsoft.com/os/Singularity/

The first research release is publicly available, and interestingly, comes with the full source code for the OS, which you can download and compile yourself here:
http://www.codeplex.com/singularity

This is also what Midori is based on, but there's very little publicly known about that. Regardless, you might want to get your facts straight.

This is why using the GPLv3 is forbidden in Codeplex.

You, my friend, are incorrect. There is a difference in unsupported and forbidden, as proven by these: Inter.Net, restarts, openLabels. If GPL v3 were forbidden then these would not be hosted on the site at all. Of course, I know that there will probably be some counter-argument about they had to use some ad-hoc method to show the license. However, these projects' preferred license is hidden because I just searched for GNU GPL and up they popped. Even your source gives no conclusive evidence that CodePlex does not allow GPL v3 projects. His link points to a request to reinstate custom licenses on CodePlex. The blogger goes as far to use the term "so it seems".

Also there is no requirement that a project hosted on CodePlex has to be for Windows. So where did you get you information?

Don't get me wrong you are free to hate Microsoft, and hate on Microsoft, but please keep it to the facts please.

This is why using the GPLv3 is forbidden in Codeplex.

You, my friend, are incorrect. There is a difference in unsupported and forbidden, as proven by these: Inter.Net, restarts, openLabels. If GPL v3 were forbidden then these would not be hosted on the site at all. Of course, I know that there will probably be some counter-argument about they had to use some ad-hoc method to show the license. However, these projects' preferred license is hidden because I just searched for GNU GPL and up they popped. Even your source gives no conclusive evidence that CodePlex does not allow GPL v3 projects. His link points to a request to reinstate custom licenses on CodePlex. The blogger goes as far to use the term "so it seems".

Also there is no requirement that a project hosted on CodePlex has to be for Windows. So where did you get you information?

Don't get me wrong you are free to hate Microsoft, and hate on Microsoft, but please keep it to the facts please.

This is why using the GPLv3 is forbidden in Codeplex.

You, my friend, are incorrect. There is a difference in unsupported and forbidden, as proven by these: Inter.Net, restarts, openLabels. If GPL v3 were forbidden then these would not be hosted on the site at all. Of course, I know that there will probably be some counter-argument about they had to use some ad-hoc method to show the license. However, these projects' preferred license is hidden because I just searched for GNU GPL and up they popped. Even your source gives no conclusive evidence that CodePlex does not allow GPL v3 projects. His link points to a request to reinstate custom licenses on CodePlex. The blogger goes as far to use the term "so it seems".

Also there is no requirement that a project hosted on CodePlex has to be for Windows. So where did you get you information?

Don't get me wrong you are free to hate Microsoft, and hate on Microsoft, but please keep it to the facts please.

Dear Morgan,

Productivity and low TCO can be gained by using IronPython Studio.

Combined with Microsoft Team Server (sold seperately) this creates the ideal Development Environment for all ISV's delivering Value to all of their clients with an effective Time To Market with Application Lifecycle Management.

It's the ideal solution for Developers, Developers, Developers.

Sincerely,

Steve Ballmer

Kind of what I was thinking. That's not actually being done though, except for the Singularity research project in the MS research division that will probably never see production status. Then again, I don't know what the future holds. http://www.codeplex.com/singularity seems to be the site for anyone interested.

When you have a language like Python, which is defined by a single (very slow) implementation

Which of C Python, PyPy, Jython, or IronPython is the only implementation?

Many SQL Calls are decades old and were copied and pasted assumed what isn't broke don't fix.

All too true. My company maintains some sites that were originally written during the 90s by a different web consulting company. The sites were happily chugging along and serving up pages for upwards of 10 years, until last weekend when they were hit with the exact attack described in this article. Fortunately, the attack was noticed early and we were able to fix the problem quickly, resulting in a minimal impact on our client's users.

I wasn't involved much with the emergency fixes, but our team ended up installing a product called dotDefender that seems to have done a fantastic job of filtering out malicious requests. It inspects GET and POST data _before_ it's passed on to the vulnerable application and stops the request if it detects things like SQL injection, cross-site scripting, directory traversal, or other attacks. If you use IIS6 and have a lot of vulnerable code; or, like us, some of the bad code is contained within compiled libraries for which you don't possess the original source, I'd definitely recommend checking it out.

Alternatively, there's a free ISAPI filter that will perform similar pre-application-level checking of GET and POST data, though I believe it only checks for SQL injection, and I can't vouch for it since I've never seen it in action.

Unfortunately, I don't believe either of these solutions work with IIS7, so if your sites run on IIS7, I wish you luck!

Err no. MS doesn't usually make their code publicly available. I wonder where you saw it..

Probably on Codeplex

the code Microsoft develops by themselves haven't you? Its not pretty.

Microsoft is a big company. The code standards, and sometimes the language, will vary from department to department. At least.

For one thing, have you heard of Phalanger? It's a PHP implementation for .NET, complete with Visual Studio integration and debugger? It's open source (BSDL-like), it runs on IIS and Apache, and it works with Mono and on Linux. And yes, it is essentially a Microsoft product now - they've hired the entire team (and before anyone wants to say something funny, Mono/Linux support was released after the buyout).

Now think about it. For starters, you can try out Phalanger, see that JIT actually helps performance, and stick with it without changing anything else - i.e. it's still LAMP, just the last bit is replaced. But now that you actually have access to .NET Framework classes, the temptation to use them might be strong (especially considering how sucky the PHP standard library is). And then eventually you stumble into the limitations of Mono, and Microsoft guys will be more than willing to sell you a W2K8 license...

Alternatively, if you already run PHP+Apache+MySQL on Windows (and it is a surprisingly popular combo these days), you might also want to consider playing with Phalanger and maybe even IIS. And then you find out that you can write ASP.NET applications in it, and pretty conveniently work with MSSQL...

To put it simply, if people want PHP and Apache so much, Microsoft will give them PHP and Apache - in such a way that those provide full hooks into MS proprietary offerings such as .NET and MSSQL. You are not forced to use them, but some people will - out of curiosity, or because they blindly think that MS is better, or because they have some needs that are genuinely better satisfied by MS offerings - and the migration path to the full Windows/IIS/MSSQL/.NET/Silverlight stack will be prepared for them. It's just business as usual.

On a side note, Phalanger can also be used to write Silverlight applications. I haven't heard about anything analogous for rich client-side content for plain PHP (Ajax, Flash, or whatever), so if PHP popularity as a language is really so great, it could play out in an interesting way.

There are several tools that can detect cut and paste code:

Simian: http://www.redhillconsulting.com.au/products/simian/
PMD: http://pmd.sourceforge.net/
DuplicateFinder: http://www.codeplex.com/DuplicateFinder

And probably others

Once you've gotten past the whitespace thing in Python you'll slap your forehead and say why didn't I use this language before? I do my development in Django and I am far more productive in it than in other web development applications. If you need to work in Java there's Jython. If you need to work in .NET there's IronPython.

There are a lot of other cool Python web technologies out there as well:TurboGears, WSGI, Plone, Zope, Twisted.

What major company hired Guido van Rossum, BDFL? What major company rolled out GoogleAppEngine (based on Django)? Ruby's pretty hot right now but so is Python.

I think the best chance they'd have at restarting would come from the Singularity team http://research.microsoft.com/os/Singularity/

The best thing that comes from this is the following:
* Written in managed C# code
* Statically verified
* Runs in software isolated processes (SIPs)
* Excellent performance due to not needing hardware protection for buffer overruns

Just a thought. You can find it on CodePlex right now at: http://codeplex.com/singularity/

They didnt 'just pick Ruby' (paraphrasing mine).

Look on the right hand side of the page here.

IronPyton, IronRuby, IronLisp, IronScheme, Lua/Nua. There are other non-dynamic ones out there too, like F#.

What MS did was NOT to pick one language to focus on. They built some really nice dynamic language support on top of the .net clr and runtime, that allows all these different non-strongly-typed-languages work well on top of .net.

They DID hire some of the notables from the Ruby and Python camps to run these projects inside MS.

I hear what you're saying, but its really not trend-whoring. The whole DLR is quite an excellent approach to dynamic languages on top of the .net clr runtime. You'll see some similar things from Java in the next few years.

The fact that you see so much about Ruby is just because Ruby is the 'new hotness' at the moment, but this too shall pass.

Yeah, Java bent over for MS's IronPython!

Of course, this isn't some kind of altruism, just business. If Microsoft can covert a large part of existing PHP installations over to Win2008, they will substantially increase their market share in the Internet server segment. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they have similar things in mind with respect to Blender, Firefox, or any other popular OSS product out there.

I can think of an entire website, which is linked from Microsoft's open source website open source page link.

Whether they contribute much (if anything) is another question entirely.

Microsoft does keep a FUD campaign about OSS being hard to use, a toy, lacking support, worse than equivalent commercial software, etc., some of which is true and some just plain smear.

I can smear Vista as well:
Vista wipes hard drives and drags your machine to a crawl. The first is a fact, at least for me - Vista automatic update left my machine in an unbootable state during the pre-SR1 patch and I had to erase my drive with an image to get it to work again. The second is smear - running OpenGL on Vista in a window is incredibly slow, but I'm applying it to the entire OS just like they do in some of their comparisons.

Keep in mind here that I don't hate MS, I hate MS's business practices (heck, I hate most business practices, but they're rich and I'm a peon, so who am I to talk?).

The question was which programming language programmers should learn, and Python is one of the few reasonable answers I've seen in the comments.

If you program in Ruby, learn Python because it has been there before you, and you can often translate Python solutions into Ruby ones. Yes, I have personally translated Python code into Ruby back when Python 1.52 was the state of the art. Then Python improved so greatly that I dropped Ruby and canme back, mainly because of the wide variety of modules available for Python. After 7 years with Python, http://del.icio.us/tag/python continues to throw up surprisingly useful stuff.

If you program in Java, learn Python because you can begin to use it today http://www.jython.org/Project/index.html to reduce the number of lines of code that you have to write. The Jython code can access all of your Java classes so there is no need to learn a new set of libraries. And Jython has solid support behind it from SUN.

If you program in C# or VB, learn Python because you can get that same advantage, leveraging all your existing libraries and classes while reducing the lines of code that you have to write. And IronPython http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?ProjectName=IronPython has solid support behind it from Microsoft.

If you need to write code for yourself, from simple scripts up to cross-platform applications, then learn Python and use one of the distros of the standard CPython such as ActiveState or Enthought. Or roll your own by downloading from http://www.python.org/ and adding the libraries that you need. Want to build wxWindows apps crossplatform? wxPython does it. Want GTK apps cross-platform? The pyGTK is the library for you. Need to distribute Windows binaries? Use Py2exe. Or for OS/X use Py2app and on UNIX use freeze.

Python has 10 years of widespread use behind it with people building everything from multi-thousand lines-of-code apps to system admin scripts. If you want to learn how to write threaded apps, Python lets you focus on the essentials. Or if you want to avoid threading and build asynchronous servers or true parallel apps, Python has modules for that as well.

If you are already a master of three or more current programming languages (not COBOL) then maybe you won't gain anything by learning Python, but every other programmer really should make it part of their toolbox. If nothing else, use it to build quick prototypes, then when it's write, redo it in C++ or Java for the final delivery. The boss will not complain if it reduces the turnaround time for your projects.

Link to the license agreement. http://www.codeplex.com/singularity/license

Website claims to be the "Open Source Project Community" but the Singularity project's license is earmarked "Custom License".


Finally, quoting the text of the license for those who don't even want to visit the website.


License: Custom License
Microsoft Research License Agreement
Non-Commercial Academic Use Only

Singularity Research Development Kit (RDK)


This Microsoft Research License Agreement, including all exhibits ("MSR-LA") is a legal agreement between you and Microsoft Corporation ("Microsoft" or "we") for the software or data identified above, which may include source code, and any associated materials, text or speech files, associated media and "online" or electronic documentation and any updates we provide in our discretion (together, the "Software").

By installing, copying, or otherwise using this Software, you agree to be bound by the terms of this MSR-LA. If you do not agree, do not install, copy, or use the Software. The Software is protected by copyright and other intellectual property laws and is licensed, not sold.

SCOPE OF RIGHTS:
You may use, copy, reproduce, and distribute this Software for any non-commercial academic purpose, subject to the restrictions in this MSR-LA. Some purposes which can be non-commercial academic are teaching, academic research, and personal experimentation. You may also distribute this Software with books or other teaching materials, or publish the Software on websites, that are intended to teach the use of the Software for academic or other non-commercial purposes. Notwithstanding anything to the contrary herein, you may only use the tools included in the Software to build the Singularity system, or build applications that will run on Singularity.

You may not use or distribute this Software or any derivative works in any form for commercial purposes. Examples of commercial purposes would be running business operations, licensing, leasing, or selling the Software, distributing the Software for use with commercial products, using the Software in the creation or use of commercial products or any other activity which purpose is to procure a commercial gain to you or others.

You may create derivative works of the Software source code and distribute the modified Software solely for non-commercial academic purposes, as provided herein.. If you distribute the Software or any derivative works of the Software, you will distribute them under the same terms and conditions as in this license, and you will not grant other rights to the Software or derivative works that are different from those provided by this MSR-LA. Your license rights to the Software (or any Microsoft intellectual property associated therewith) does not include any license, right, power or authority to subject the Software or derivative works thereof in whole or in part to the terms of any license that requires as a condition of use, modification and/or distribution of software subject to such license that the software or other software combined and/or distributed with such software be (A) disclosed or distributed in source code form; (B) licensed for the purpose of making derivative works; or (C) redistributable at no charge.

If you have created derivative works of the Software, and distribute such derivative works, you will cause the modified files to carry prominent notices so that recipients know that they are not receiving the original Software. Such notices must state: (i) that you have changed the Software; and (ii) the date of any changes.

In return, we simply require that you agree:

1. That you will not remove any copyright or other notices from the Software.

2. That if any of the Software is in binary format, you will not attempt to modify such portions of the Software, or to reverse engineer or decompile them, except and only to the

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No part of that is free, hence the !free title of this thread.

Thoughts in the open is a good thing(tm). Unfortunately Singularity is not an example of this.

There's a list of the applications here

No IE, but it has Pong!

| Microsoft is attempting to become more open source friendly

No, it isn't.


What evidence do you base that statement on?
I ask sinceI see some evidence that parts of MS, particularly around developer tools, are trying with some success to open up to the developers who use thier code.
Most of it's on Codeplex, e.g. The Ajax control toolkit
Scott Guthrie's blog is fairly open about this kind of thing.

So, care to back that up?

| Microsoft is attempting to become more open source friendly

No, it isn't.


What evidence do you base that statement on?
I ask sinceI see some evidence that parts of MS, particularly around developer tools, are trying with some success to open up to the developers who use thier code.
Most of it's on Codeplex, e.g. The Ajax control toolkit
Scott Guthrie's blog is fairly open about this kind of thing.

So, care to back that up?

Probably not, since all the screenshots I've seen still use the Windows window manager.

Vista/XP Virtual Desktop Manager is the one I use, and it's nice - great features, light weight, hasn't crashed in ages since I updated to the latest version, includes a window recovery tool to find and restore orphaned windows if it does crash, nice customizable shortcuts, free of cost and open source. Vista users with the WDM can get live views in the modes displaying all desktops, or all windows on the current desktop, but the features apparently work on XP too (just with static images). URL: http://www.codeplex.com/vdm

HyperAddin is actually merely on my "list of things to try", I have never actually installed it even. It's at http://www.codeplex.com/hyperAddin, part of "Microsoft's open source project hosting web site". On a new project, theoretically it would be great to link things up as you believe you understand them. On the other hand I have met folks who would actually delete all comments from something they are trying to understand, but that philosophy goes too far, I think a grain-of-salt is what you want.

I'm surprised they didn't just use their IronPython. Same simplicity, same scripting capabilities (well, a superset), and it actually has a future (well, at least the standard CPython does). Much more powerful for OOP and Perl-type duties as well.

Furikup is a beta quality SIP client for the PSP. It's always nice to see the increasing number of devices supporting SIP. Without the luxury of having a PSP to play with Furikup, but having another SIP device (Nokia E61) I can give some recommendations to new users Voice-over-IP (VoIP).

There are a number of free incoming number DID providers. A few examples:

SipNumber provides Iowa State numbers.
IPKall provides Washington State Numbers.
OrbTalk provides London geographic numbers.

Google's Recent acquisition of GrandCentral is a very tempting prospect even though it is not a true SIP provider. You can get a phone number in almost any locale with GrandCentral and forward the number to the above two US-based providers. You may almost register for a Gizmo account and forward directly to it through GrandCentral. Once the Gizmo SIP account is registered to your device it'll ring when called from a regular landline.

The problem with having this many accounts is finding a service which can aggregate your numbers in one place so you don't have dozens of SIP accounts to register in your device. Voxalot is a nice service but they charge $15/year. Another one is PBXES.org but I would stay away from them. They have a notorious reputation of locking accounts and demanding a 50 Euro ransom to regain access. My personal favorite is MySipSwitch. It's free, does SIP aggregation, and allows simple dial-plans to maximize cheap calling over SIP. It's also an open-source project and the developers directly answer questions from the community in the forums.

Coupling this with services like PhoneGnome, it's possible receive calls from all over the world with some very simple guides (link #1, link #2) out there. Go ahead and give it a try. A big congrats to the coders that are bringing SIP functionality to the PSP.

Windows NT has always supported multiple desktops under the hood, and MS has had a powertoy that exposes this for ages.

There's many other third-party virtual desktop managers around, if you look, even for Vista.

I have a different question to ask? Why do so many web sites requite scripting in the first place? It is one thing to provided reduced functionality if the client does not support scripting (by default I do not run javascript, java, Flash, etc), but why require it? I don't care about the neat media and am quite willing skip it and conserve my bandwidth.

Exactly. I recently tried to download some open source software from Microsoft's CodePlex, and found that you can't download the source files without javascript enabled! I sent them an email about it, asking if they could make basic stuff just work for the paranoid among us, but by all means to use it to make a better user experience if its enabled.

They got back to me fairly soon, thanking me for the suggestion, and suggesting I re-submit it as a feature request. I wasn't quite sure what to make of that - that was the feature request!

.NET framework libraries will be released under MS-RL.
See http://www.codeplex.com/ for some software under MS-PL.

IronPython is not a language!

Actually, I believe it is. There are substantial differences between IronPython and the reference Python implementation. C++/CLI is a language, IMO, and so is IronPython.

What, no Bash shell??? No Firefox installed by default??? Where's python??? Where's xchat??? Where's apt-get... I don't want to sit around clicking on installers all day!!?!? ARGHGHGH.

Um, what? Why would they include any of those things in the first place? If that's your frustration with Windows, well, its a pretty poor reason to be frustrated.

Anywho, if you want a good cmd shell, get powershell for Vista. Vista also comes with IE; you may not like it, but complaining it doesn't come with FF would be like complaining linux doesn't come with Opera or Safari.

If you really want to do python, you should check out IronPython. Supposedly its faster than many of the other Phython implementations out there.

The AJAX tool kit for one . After reading the license, click on the source code tab to look at the actual source code.

You underestimate children.

? Perhaps I was unclear. I don't mean that OLPC is "dumbed down" (it's not). I mean that the custom UI is designed for self-directed exploration of both the computer and the world accessible to the computer, with minimal IT infrastructure. This is simply not true of off-the-shelf laptops, as anyone who gets to help maintain them will testify. (And I trust you're aware that the child can easily switch from the custom UI to Gnome, right? At least, the one I played with at PyCon did, and the speaker indicated that was the plan for production.)

Thus, a child in Nigeria, let's call her Fa'izah, handed a stock Windows computer (your words), would have [a] no problem or [b] much problem with the following?

1. Connecting wirelessly to another stock Windows laptop in the next village, 1 km away, which is not connected to the Internet, and is owned by (let's say) Maimunaand, and collaboratively working with her on an art project;
2. Figure out how to connect her new friend Maimuna to the Internet, using a peer-to-peer multi-hop mesh network from Maimuna's laptop to Fa'izah's laptop to the satellite dish at the school, 2 km in the opposite direction from Maimuna, so Maimuna can browse Wikipedia for ideas on the art project;
3. After taking a wrong turn in the project, "rolling back" several saves to the version that looked best, and restarting from there; and
4. Having finished the project, and become interested in how Microsoft Paint draws patterns, look at the source code to figure it out for herself.

That is the type of collaborative, self-directed educational experience that OLPC is intending to foster. Sorry to sound like an evangelist - I'm not even affiliated with OLPC in any way. But as a teacher, I get pretty jazzed at the possibilities of some of their innovations, and hope to see them in the mainstream soon.

And the OS UI is written in Python, not compatible with anything out there.

Uh, Microsoft? http://www.codeplex.com/IronPython/ (Or maybe I misunderstand what you mean by "not compatible with anything"?)

The point of providing a UI in a dynamic language is to make it easily modified by the children (which is not under-estimating them, IMHO). Python is a good choice because (1) it runs on pretty much every other computer and virtual platform in the world, so the knowledge gained will transfer wherever the child goes, (2) it's easier to learn than most languages (*far* easier than C++!), and (3) it's a full strength language promoted and used heavily by some of the largest corporations in the world - at Google, for instance, 'python is one of the 3 "official languages" alongside with C++ and Java' http://panela.blog-city.com/python_at_google_greg_stein__sdforum.htm, not to mention NASA, Lockheed Martin, Industrial Light and Magic... well, you can google if you like.

The XO isn't perfect, but I obviously think rather highly of it, and believe it is unorthodox in all the right places. If you still don't see why, we are probably just looking for very different things in an educational laptop. Time will tell which approach prevails, I suppose.

Iron Python count? http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?ProjectName =IronPython

Dude. You are flamebaiting, because microsoft distributes it as source under a permissive license. With tests. Anyone can port it, if it doesn't run already under Linux (and people are running it ... )

They don't have to.
This: http://www.codeplex.com/QuantityFramework/Project/ License.aspx uses Apache licence. This: http://www.codeplex.com/ExportSQLScript/Project/Li cense.aspx uses GPL v2

They don't have to.
This: http://www.codeplex.com/QuantityFramework/Project/ License.aspx uses Apache licence. This: http://www.codeplex.com/ExportSQLScript/Project/Li cense.aspx uses GPL v2

Mod parent down. About half of the projects linked to in TFA use the Ms-PL, for example AJAX Control Toolkit. (I've also seen projects on codeplex.com that use the Windows-only Ms-LPL, though TFA doesn't link to any of those.)