Microsoft Shared Source License
time to read 2 min | 215 words

As a developer who is involved in Open Source projects, I understand that licensing is a nasty but important part of software. I read the Shared Source CLI license and was surprised by how legible it was. In essense, it means "Don't use it for commerical purposes and don't change the license in deriative works." I was surprised to find this piece there, though:

 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 be there to deal with the "tainting" problem that some people are afraid of (where if you look at some code, and then you use stuff you remember in another project, you may be liable). I really like this approach. I wonder what it means for the Mono Project. This seems to give them a license to poke at the sample implementation and take the knowledge (but not the code itself, of course) and re-implement it.

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