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Comment by wengo314 | Hacker News Reader

don't quote me on that but i read somewhere that microsoft has a strict policy of NIH in their codebase - everything gets reimplemented from scratch unless it's completely unfeasible.

The only problem might be the software patents that their code leverages.

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Why would parents prevent publishing of source code?

Unless you mean that someone could see that you implemented their patent and retroactively go to sue them?

A license to use someone else's code doesn't necessarily include permission to publish the source.

A patent isn't permission to use their code, that would be a copyright.

A patent is a method, not an implementation.

We’re not talking about patents. Software licenses are about me allowing you to use code that I wrote, which is copyright.

Literally the person I initially responded to said:

> The only problem might be the software patents that their code leverages.

We are talking about patents because Wengo brought it up and I was asking how they are applicable here.

If the licensed code was written by a patent licensee, then to replicate it in-house you’d also need to license the patent yourself.

In other words, the patent licensee may have a license to write and distribute their specific piece of software, but not to sublicense that to other people to write their own software, just to use the parent company's patent license. That is actually probably a common patent-license scenario, microsoft doesn't automatically get sublicensing rights just because they bought software developed by a licensee.

Their code for Zip folder compression/decompression is licensed from a 3rd party.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180515-00/?p=98...

What is "NIH"? Google only mentions health institutions.

"Not invented here" syndrome

Not invented here.

From memory they got their TCP/IP stack via the MIT licence

BSD license, because Berkeley was literally paid to port TCP/IP to Unix (and C) on basis that the resulting code would be available for incorporation by others free of charge.

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