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Top 25 Hottest Open-Source Projects at Microsoft Codeplex
willdavid writes "Via CNet, a link to a blog post with the top 25 most active open-source projects on Microsoft's Codeplex site. As the CNet blogger notes, 'Codeplex is interesting to me for several reasons, but primarily because it demonstrates something that I've argued for many years now: open source on the Windows platform is a huge opportunity for Microsoft. It is something for the company to embrace, not despise.'"
Wow. Cool proyect.
The issue is not that it restricts use, but that it's triggered by use. The GPL does not apply to people who USE GPL software, only to people who redistribute it; a major principle of F/OSS is that no legal encumberance should be placed on users at any time, to use a piece of software in any manner for which it may be suitable.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Spot on; which is why it's so annoying when people insist on using the GPL as an EULA. That's like asking employees to sign a script of Spongebob Squarepants instead of a contract, before they start work --- not only is it completely meaningless and useless, it brands you as someone who doesn't know what you're talking about.
A redistribution license (like the GPLv2) is NOT an EULA. They are totally different things.
In contrast, Free software licenses (BSD, MIT, GPL, etc.) cover only the distribution of the software. You do not need to accept any "license" just to use the software. For example, here the relevant paragraph from GPL:
So Free software licenses are indeed licenses: i.e. they grant you more rights than what you get by default under copyright law. EULAs, including microsoft's "permissive license" attempt to restrict your rights by controlling how you can use the software.So it is difficult to see microsoft's "permissive license" as anything but a trojan horse. Especially since it has an uglier brother, the "limited permissive license", which sounds confusingly similar to "permissive license", but adds a completely ridiculous restriction: you can only run the software on windows.
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If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Don't blame the installer, blame the person who wrote the install script. The EULA is generally optional (e.g. with Inno Setup, you have a choice between doing nothing, using "InfoBeforeFile" to show something, or using "LicenseFile" to show something that requires agreement).
There is a difference. You get GPL/LGPL "EULA" because of brain-dead installers that assume there must be EULA, and/or people who write the install scripts. However, the license itself explicitly states that you do *not* need to accept it merely to use the software. Microsoft's "license" explicitly states exactly the opposite. And while MS-PL does not actually restrict use, MS-LPL absolutely does. Therefore, MS-PL is a trojan horse: it's purpose is to make people accept the idea that controlling how the supposedly "open source" software is used is ok. I do not believe this is a logic error, as you say. I believe it's intentional.
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If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Last i heard, it would only create some sort of bastardized python code that was no longer cross platform.
.NET, so it will run on any Mono supported OS as well as Windows.
.NET. It's trivial to access .NET libraries from IronPython, while CPython doesn't make it easy. I'd expect migration mostly from cPython to IronPython (the biggest issue I had was regex related). If you don't want .NET integration, stay with cPython.
That's not correct; IronPython runs on Mono or
You may mean that IronPython scripts are not 100% compatible with a CPython implementation. Well, duh! Even different versions of CPython aren't 100% compatible! Jython isn't 100% compatible with CPython. IronPython is fairly compatible with CPython 2.4.4; the list of differences is available here, so you can avoid them if you ever want to run your code on different Python systems.
The big advantage IronPython has is the integration with
That has nothing to do with the license and everything to do with the installer.
Things you apparently are incapable of thinking about.
1) This only happens if you download the installer. If you download the zip or the source you don't have to agree to jack.
2) This only happens for the windows version, people who use linux just use their package manager.
I don't know why it is so difficult for you to think about these things but perhaps you should push yourself and actually try to understand when a license applied to you and when it doesn't.
evil is as evil does
it seems that all Microsoft "open source" licenses require to run Windows
i censingbasics/permissivelicense.mspx
Please tell me where the word "Windows" even appears in this license. I don't see it. Maybe you should actually read them before you make such comments.
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/l
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no, isos aren't out. You do have to include the source code in the iso, though.
If you use the GPLv2 or even the GPLv3 without the "or later versions" clause, like many software projects do, how exactly are you at the mercy of the FSF?
Umm... no.
The FSF has no ability to alter the text of existing versions of the GPL. If you want to use only the GPLv1 and no other version, you can say that and the FSF has no way to magically change the license text that you distribute with your code. If you want to say "Version X or later", then you're leaving an opening to the FSF to change things (which might even be a good idea), but including that text or not is your choice.
The creation of a new copyleft license at this point in time is simply not-invented-here syndrome on the part of some corporate lawyers, and the result is license compatibility issues. Any full copyleft license is innately incompatible with any other, and that's caused enough hassle over the last 18 years that there's no reason to do it again now.
Non-copyleft permissive licenses aren't really a problem - the only annoyance is having to read yet another license that's basically equivalent to the X11 license and be sure that that's what it really says.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
I know slashdotters loath Ms-PL, but not all of the projects use Ms-PL anyway.
If you had bothered to check the license of the listed projects you'd see that some of them use GPL or LGPL (the only licenses that slashdotters appear to respect).
For example, the PHPExcel, which allows PHP code to read/write Excel 2007 files, uses LGPL.
Still other projects use custom licenses, like the GoTraxxx project.
Microsoft's own projects use MS licenses like Ms-PL and Ms-CL (both pending OSI-certification) but non-MS projects can use any license the devs choose to use.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
Please stop repeating Groklaw FUD. .NET and Mono).
A couple weeks ago, Groklaw decided to FUD Microsoft's submission of their licenses to OSI by talking of licenses that Microsoft has not even submitted to OSI, namely the Ms-LPL and Ms-LCL. Those are "L"imited versions of Ms-PL and Ms-CL that tie the source to Windows. Microsoft has not submitted those, rather, they have submitted Ms-PL and Ms-CL, which most certainly are platform independent, as IronPython proves (its code released under Ms-PL and runs on
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
Have any of you people that constantly bring up Mono as a solution actually ever tried it? Sure, Mono covers a lot of the libraries, but practically every .NET application of significant size steps into some of the libraries that Mono doesn't cover. Very few .NET applications will run on Mono without significant changes to the code.
.NET and only run on Windows.
Very few of the applications which the article refers to have even the slightest chance of running on Mono since they both use libraries that Mono hasn't implemented, and rely on proprietary applications which are not written with
The fact of the matter is that Mono will never be a solution unless Microsoft decides to support it. What's perhaps even worse, is that by its mere existence it allows Microsoft and Microsoft fans to make ridiculous claims about being "cross-platform".
However, you are correct, CodePlex projects use various licenses, it seems, FWIW.
That would be the Limited Permissive License. The Ms-PL might stand a chance of being accepted by OSI, the LPL however will not. Which is also why they haven't submitted that one to OSI.
The only difference between the PL and the CL seems to be the Reciprocal Grants condition present in the CL, which is somewhat akin to what the GPL says about being required to distribute the source and the license along with the binary. The PL, then, seems somewhat closed to the BSD license in that you only have to retain the copyright notices. However, both licenses say,
Wonder what licenses apply here? Presumably other OSI licenses if the MS licenses get OSI-approved?
Regardless of all that, I still don't see the point of these licenses. There are plenty of good Open Source licenses out there for people to choose from, why the hell would I choose this one? Somehow I find it hard to believe in MS's genuine goodwill. Call me prejudiced, but I don't trust these licenses. If MS were genuinely interested in Open Source, they'd use a known approved license instead of coming up with their own.
Please show an installer that REQUIRES a license and explain what this has to do with windows.
The Microsoft Installer (MSI) does not require a license.