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Comment by awda | Hacker News Reader

This library comes as a .msi (Microsoft installer) and a license in .rtf format ("rich text" -- who uses this anymore?). In short, it's what you'd expect from Microsoft: not open source, not open at all, and the license probably limits you to non-commercial use and non-redistribution.

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It comes with source, and is open-source for non-commercial purposes. (It's not licensed for commercial use at all.)

I'm not convinced this is so bad. Most companies who don't want to share in-house software with other companies just keep it in-house, and the world at large never hears of it. By sharing the software with academics and hobbyists, they're at least sharing it more than the default not-at-all.

There is no such thing as open source for non-commercial purposes, that is not open.

That depends on whose definition of open source you're using.

There's only one correct definition of open source: Whichever one keeps the flamewar going.

I believe it is open... just not Free.

It's not open source according to "The Open Source Definition" http://www.opensource.org/osd.html - being able to simply view the source code is just not good enough.

Aforge is an excellent open-source alternative that is years in development:

http://code.google.com/p/aforge/

It doesn't seem to provide any Bayesian inference methods

Aforge is not even close to Infer.NET. The latter is a library to build graphical models and automatically generate deterministic inference algorithms for them. Trust me when I say there are probably less then 25 people in the world that can derive some of these inference algorithms without spending weeks studying the relevant papers (e.g. EP).

Aforge is just a collections of algorithms. It's nothing to do with building your own models. Useful nonetheless.

MS Cambridge has been developing this for years. I have only done some toy tests on it a couple of years ago. I think it could be very useful, but that license...ouch! So unless you are an academic, student, hobbyist, or (maybe) charity, why bother?

None of your comment has anything to do with the rest of your comment.

Seriously, how do you get all that from "uses platform-standard installer and file formats"? Besides which your assumptions seem to be answered right on the download page....

Includes the Infer.NET compiler and runtime, examples and tutorials, offline documentation, and source code for factors and distributions.

Please note that Infer.NET is downloadable for non-commercial use only; no commercial licenses are available at this time.

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