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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.'"
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.
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.
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
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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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
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".