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'Shared Source' .NET Overview

Posted by timothy on from the fwiw dept.

Lisa writes: "As part of Microsoft's Shared Source initiative, the company announced Tuesday the public availability of more than 1 million lines of Windows and Microsoft .NET source code--aimed primarily at universities. I guess Microsoft hopes to slow down academic support for the open-source Linux OS. Don't know why they expect this to work, but Brian Jepson has a nice overview of this shared source release."

2 of 15 comments (clear)

  1. Actually... by Daftspaniel · · Score: 3, Informative

    Microsoft have released source code for years. For example the MFC Class library has the source provided with Visual Studio which helps for debugging.

  2. FSF General Counsel's Opinion by bjepson · · Score: 4, Informative

    > If you want to do real open source,
    > do not look at the poison.

    Eben Moglen, General Counsel to the Free Software Foundation, told the DotGNU project that programmers will not be tainted by reading the source, so long as they don't copy any of the code.

    - Brian