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Comment by ErrantX | Hacker News Reader

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)

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