Only those who have no interest whatsoever in Open Source development… Or don’t mind being liable to lawsuits from the world’s largest law firm

The man behind Mono (the Open Source, cross-platform, application framework that allows .net applications to work on Linux and Mac), Miguel de Icaza, has just told all the contributors to steer well clear of it: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Oct-03.html

“But like Rotor, the license under which this code is released is not open-source. People that are interested in continuing to contribute to Mono, or that are considering contributing to Mono’s open source implementation of those class libraries should not look at this upcoming source code release.”

Yes I do. Microsoft has always been very good at listening to what developers want, this is just a part of that.

Microsoft is never going to be a hair shirt Open Source company, but I still think that they should be applauded for opening up a key platform. A lot of developers will thank them for helping to reduce the stress of writing code.

As I said, it isn’t released as Open Source. And that places a tremendous burden on any one who is, or might be in the future, an Open Source contributor/project owner.

Microsoft has proven time and time again, that they “hate” open source with a passion and will go to extreme lengths to try and stop it’s incursion into what M$ clearly believes is their own private monopoly.

Any one who “might” contribute to Open Source projects would be well advised to not look at the code and not sign-up to the license. By doing so they will be leaving themselves wide open for accusations at a later date.

This could, if M$ decide to use it, provide them with significant ammunition to go after Open Source projects for Copyright or IP infringement.

You don’t really think they are doing this for altruistic reasons; do you?

It is unfortunate that you can’t celebrate something that a lot of open source advocates have been asking for for a long time.