[Mono-list] Shared source CLI beta released

[Miguel de Icaza]

> You may use any information in intangible form that you remember after
> accessing the Software. However, this right does not grant you a license
> to any of Microsoft's copyrights or patents for anything you might
> create using such information.
> --
> 
> This seems to imply that merely looking at the software and remembering
> how things work does not stop a person from working on projects like
> mono and dotgnu.

This basically allows people to "glance" at the code and then you are
free to go and implement your own.

The problem is with software patents.  Since people can patent pretty
much anything, and since patents usually have claims that cover the
entire world while they only are covering a new invention, if you look
at Rotor and later on contribute to Mono, it will be hard to prove that
you were not influenced by the "design of the patents that you
assimilated" while reading Rotor.

That being said, pretty much everything that Rotor is shipping now, we
have in release form (0.10 ;-).  Also, more interesting pieces like
ASP.NET and ADO.NET are not covered by this release.

Anyways, I will ask our lawyers to read this information, but for the
time being, stay out of the shared source implementation.  Remember: we
do have now pretty much everything they do [1] ;-)

If you can not wait to read some source code, and you just can not
resist the urge, do not worry, here are some blobs of code that you can
read to entertain yourself, and are less dangerous code out there you
can read: recently I ran into Suif and Machine Suif projects (for
compiler people), there is the Linux kernel, the Atheos Kernel (for OS
people), new windowing systems, the MesaGL implementation (for GUI
people), TrollTech released Qtopia (embedded OS platform), Pango is a
nice Unicode rendering framework, libart a postscript imaging model
implementation, Raph's new Ghostscript, OpenOffice (full office source
code), the Intel ORP Virtual Machine.

And of course, Mono ;-)

[1] Except for the Java Script implementation.

Miguel.