Sandcastle Redux

re: Sandcastle Redux

Joe — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 11:59:57 GMT

Given the kerfuffle surrounding SandCastle and Codeplex, it seems surprising that EntLib is still on codeplex, given that the source appears only to be available:

- on an external site

- that requires registration

- in a platform-specific form (MSI)

- that requires other software to be installed (.NET 3.5)

re: Sandcastle Redux

AC — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 06:23:56 GMT

Great now you've stopped publishing comments at all it seems. Great "conversation"!

Participate08

Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 15:13:33 GMT

On July 21 I will have the honor and pleasure of being the sponsor, host, and an active participant in

re: Sandcastle Redux

Aaron Fulkerson — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 00:55:30 GMT

It's a Trap!

LOL. Sorry, I couldn't resist starting my comment with that. :-)

Yawn...there are plenty of non-OSI approved projects at SourceForge. MS policing this at Codeplex is more than SourceForge does. I know this from personal experience. I'm not criticizing SourceForge. They are a media company. They do, generally, represent open source quite well.

re: Sandcastle Redux

falde — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 21:58:22 GMT

There is a lot of people that says stuff like David, but its mostly trolling. I suspect that this has to do with Microsoft behavior in the past rather then issues with the Ms-PL license. Or it is a sarcastic remark on Ms:s view on the GPL, where Ms uses the same arguments.

I see the same arguments when it comes to C# in Linux. Some have a strong aversion against it and argue that Java is better because its "not microsoft", tottaly missing the fact that Mono is a novell project and has nothing to do with microsoft.

Strangely this arguments are not raised against wine. If any project is a legal minefield it should be wine.

Also the license SUN has on most of it projects seam to be far more restrictive then Ms-PL but i don't see much people *** about that. SUN may have been a lot smarter then MS about using the open source community to their own advantage, but i see no reason to trust them. For example, what stops sun from terminating OpenJava once its popular on the desktop and start charging for a closed source product? This is the problem i see with the GPL license. The code owner can do that, and the license allows them to terminate the open version and any fork of it. This was used by some GPL:ed projects to punish SCO.

What happens if Novell does this to Mono? Yeah, DotGNU is what happens. Currently that project lives in the shadow of Mono but it provides us with a failsafe.

Thats probably enough ranting for today. :)

re: Sandcastle Redux

Bill C — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 01:02:44 GMT

Sam, David is serious. I don't know where you've been, but anyone who follows MS FUD and propoganda feels much the same way. MS does NOT have a good rep amongst the Open Source Community for many good reasons. When I removed my 'blinders' I left MSDN, and started dev on linux systems. That was over 5 years ago and I've not looked back. Good luck with your projects, but I can't say that I have any faith in MS Products.

re: Sandcastle Redux

Sam Ramji — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 04:11:10 GMT

@jkew - thanks for the support.

@David J Patrick - either you're joking or you have a specific set of issues to discuss (or else you are simply trolling). Do you care to elaborate?

re: Sandcastle Redux

Kjartan Þór — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 00:18:02 GMT

This is great news, I like that you hold Microsoft projects to such a high standard for being published on Codeplex, I recently found a project there I was going to check out if it worked for me but couldn't since the source did not include everything needed. The project in question is the EvNet community platform, and there are some binaries referenced there that are not provided along with the project, so as it stands its just a useless pile of bits :-(

Open Source en Microsoft, el tropiezo de SandCastle

La Naturaleza del Software — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 04:26:47 GMT

Aunque ustedes no lo crean, Microsoft publica software OpenSource. De hecho hay 2 licencias de Microsoft aprobadas oficialmente por la OSI, la Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL), y la Microsoft Reciprocal License (Ms-RL). Pero les cuesta, y es claro que

re: Sandcastle Redux

David J Patrick — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 12:50:54 GMT

It's a TRAP !

Those of us who understand how open source works know that the Ms-PL is a trojan horse full of lawyers and intended to pollute the GPL. The tiniest bit of Ms-PL code will render any project subject to future litigation and FUD. It is a transparent attempt to co-opt naive open source developers to destroy FOSS, and only a fool would consider using the Ms-PL in a serious attempt at interoperability.

Kudos on delivering this load of poison with a straight face.

re: Sandcastle Redux

jkew — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 21:01:56 GMT

Matt's article from June 7th says it best:

Matt Asay:

"In Sam's defense, this sort of thing is not uncommon in open source, including on Sourceforge. Open source is a (mostly) self-policing community, and Microsoft, to the extent that it continues to participate, has become a member of that community, with all the benefits and bile that come with it (mostly benefits :-)."

-- news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-9962666-16.html

In the same article Matt also defends the ExtJS decision to go from LGPL+weirdness to a dual license (Commercial + GPL) -- The ExtJS people burned bridges by clarifying out potential support customers who never considered client-side javascript "close-binding"; especially when mentioned in conjunction with the LGPL. They did this in a point release. Businesses were forced to shift quickly to another library or ponder a fork.

It's nice to see that MS chose to go less-restrictive, than more restrictive in this Sandcastle issue, for those at least who were *planning* on making modifications.

All of this stuff would be much better off if developers were more knowledgeable about these licenses in the first place. Sometimes that just doesn't happen.