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Comment by socratees | Hacker News Reader

This sounds horrible. Microsoft shouldn't be blamed for this entirely though. Why wouldn't the team that created this think through before?

From what I know, people inside Microsoft make sure they don't get in to any legal trouble before they make use of any code or idea that's already available.

Anyways, this episode is a blatant disrespect for IP. Copying the code is something awful. I believe this case deserves the attention of authorities at Microsoft.

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Legal compliance is VERY important at Microsoft, so much so that we aren't supposed to even read Open Source source code.

Well, at the other extreme the gnu people also try not to look into other code, even if it is open-source !

http://sourceware.org/ml/libc-help/2008-08/msg00009.html

And it shows...

That seems a somewhat knee jerk / extreme approach to the problem :)

Risks stifling innovative code?

And yet not uncommon. We (Django) had a rather frustrating mailing-list exchange with IBM folks who wanted to build a DB2 driver for Django; they claimed their corporate policies wouldn't allow them to look at the existing Django DB backends, or anything BSD-licensed, to gather information on the API.

Wow, are you serious? What ended up as the solution?

Here's the django-dev thread:

http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers/browse_thre...

Eventually they wrote an adapter; I don't have any idea how they got the API spec, since they swore up and down they couldn't look at existing code.

(and, to be honest, the initial released version of their DB2 adapter showed some serious issues which may be related to not understanding how the code was supposed to work)

I don't think it's an extreme approach. It would otherwise be nearly impossible to prove that Microsoft's code is not derived from GPL'd works. At least without revealing their code.

I disagree; "you shouldn't read Open Source code" doesn't fix anything much because it's impossible to find out if developers are sticking to it or not (so it doesn't decrease the burden of proof). It's just as impossible to prove that MS work doesn't include GPL code with or without the rule :)

A better (more effective) one is, surely, dont reuse restricted code.... :)

Microsoft actually tries to enforce the policy of "you shouldn't read Open Source code". For example, they block access to Sourceforge from the Microsoft campus.

That is totally false. There are no restrictions of any kind on the Microsoft network in general (apart from your standard virus/malware/firewall type stuff).

I've synced code for my projects from sourceforge/google code/github often.

So if I may ask--how to use sourceforge/google code/github without looking at open source? Perhaps you are contributing without reading?

That is not true. I'm on Sourceforge on a MS Corporate machine right now. MS doesn't block anything at all.

It is true we are not supposed to look at anyone else's source code though.

What about at home?

I realise the policy is probably not as originally worded here: but I was taking it somewhat literally to point out the fallacy of it.

At some point we have to trust devs to do their own work. This should show that no amount of policy can stop people ripping off work! Whatever the intention.

Reading code is always good; there is usually a net gain as long as it is ethical (i.e. not copied)

Yeah I know. And if they decide to make use of any 3rd party application or code internally, they make sure they don't unintentionally mess up with legal requirements of the software. This certainly is an isolated case which needs serious investigation.

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