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.'"

Comments

Re:Open source projects?

[iluvcapra]

Exactly what restrictions are they putting on your use of it?

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.

I can't believe people still don't get this

[RelliK]

Microsoft "permissive license" attempts to control the mere use of the software:

This license governs use of the accompanying software. If you use the software, you accept this license. If you do not accept the license, do not use the software.

So it is neither a "license" nor "permissive". It is unilateral contract, no different than click-through EULA.

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:

You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or run a copy of the Program. Ancillary propagation of a covered work occurring solely as a consequence of using peer-to-peer transmission to receive a copy likewise does not require acceptance. However, nothing other than this License grants you permission to propagate or modify any covered work. These actions infringe copyright if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or propagating a covered work, you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so.

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.

Re:Open source projects?

[RelliK]

I think the silly MS license has the same sort of logical error in it. It has boilerplate language that says it applies to use, but it places no restrictions on use. If it's not free, then GTK+ is not free.

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.

Re:Open for Closed

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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 .NET and only run on Windows.

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".