IronPython is fully open source and was the first project to be released under Microsoft’s OSI approved Ms-PL (Microsoft Public License).

[...]

Despite this the IronPython development process is shackled with some lawyer imposed restrictions. Community members can’t contribute to the project, IronPython developers can’t look at the source code of Python itself and IronPython can’t submit code changes or fixes back to Python or its standard library. It is only recently that we have had public commit messages on checkins to the public repository and that the Python standard library has been included with IronPython. The team still aren’t able to modify the standard library for better compatibility with IronPython though; neither do they publish the internal tests they use on IronPython.

So, the IronProject is 100% “fullyopen source”, assuming your definition of open source is:

• The community can’t contribute to the project
• The project can’t contribute to the community beyond the immediate project itself.
• Project developers can not even look at related Free and Open Source code.

What exactly is the purpose of using an Open Source license and calling yourself “Open Source”, if you use extra-license methods to prevent the very things that make Open Source work? Is it just PR, to be able to pretend to be open source-friendly?

Just release under a no-charge proprietary EULA; not this Neutered Source™ garbage.

Let me be clear

This is not an attack against the IronPython project or its developers. I’m sure they are all fine people with a fine project. It is just funny to me that some people want so bad to pretend Microsoft is something it is not.

2009-Jul-6 Update: Upon personal request from the author I have removed the cached copies, and am just quoting the body of the article here, without links and personal identification.
What follows quoted is the original text of the author:

Fuck you, Richard Stallman and other GNU/Trolls
Published by admin on June 28, 2009 in Uncategorized
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This is a response to Richard Stallman’s article http://www.fsf.org/news/dont-depend-on-mono

Disclosure: This rant doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that I intern at Microsoft and that I am writing an extension to the MonoDevelop project. It is a rant to express my core belief that freedom is open to interpretation. I believe viral copyleft licenses like GPL are evil, and I believe that software patents are more evil. While I’m new to the mono project, it aligns perfectly with my vision that they key for great programs is interoperability and ease of development.

Why am I writing this? I feel hurt when fear mongering assholes focus so much energy on bringing things down rather than really constructing anything. You never see any real open source developer complain, that’s because they’re too busy writing awesome code.

On Patents and the FUD:

* There are two kinds of open source users in the world – People who love open source, and people who hate microsoft and proprietary software. I’m part of the first, which one are you?
* I know NOTHING about patent law and how dangerous having these applications on your machine can be. In other words, I know as much as you do about all of this
* Most open source softwares replicate some features which may be patented. Do you think there won’t be patent issues over Openoffice or Gimp which replicate commercial software’s functionality.
* A mentor of mine told me that patents are to prevent companies from getting sued, not to sue companies.
* You don’t want to keep a free implementation of a language on your machine, but you are okay with downloading off bittorrent and aren’t worried about getting sued.
* GNote represents the limit of FUD to me. Tomboy is awesome and Sandy Armstrong doubly so.
* I’m no expert on patents, but “There might be risk” sounds just like “There might not be risk”. At the end the question is whether it’s finally worth it.
* Please read Jo Shield’s article if my intellectually devoid rant hasn’t convinced you.
* Roy Schestowitz (of boycottnovell.com) is a dick. Period. I would never respect anyone who spends more effort spreading fear and bringing things down rather than contributing anything significant.

On Mono and C#:

* Have a look at gnome-do, which runs on mono(http://do.davebsd.com). That thing you’re feeling when you open the link is pure undiluted lust lust.
* Firefox has 80,000 lines of code. The MonoDevelop project has 800,000 lines. The Mono project (just mono) has 8 fucking million lines, let’s not forget the debugger, compiler and gtk# bindings. (ohloh.net)
* I have met the nicest and most helpful people I know on the Mono project. Even the most busy and experienced of devs (hello mhutch and lluis!) take time off to help (and spoonfeed) me whenever I need.
* C# is plain awesome. I used to think it was bloated and MS specific  (just like most of you), but an awesome standard library, coupled with type safety, innovative features and tight IDE integration make it a killer platform for development.
* I could go on about how blissful an experience it is to write code in a full featured, statically typed language. But you’re too full of propoganda to listen.

My thoughts on the GPL:

* “Freedom or Death” is not freedom. Wikipedia defines freedom as “Freedom is the right to act according to ones will without being held up by the power of others.” How am I even remotely free if I *have* to license all my code under GPL if I use GPLed libraries? Isn’t the right for a person to release liberal or proprietary software come under his/her freedom too as long as it’s not harming anyone?
* I want the freedom to use the BSD or MIT license in my projects. I’m preventing from even referencing GPL libraries (not LGPL) while I’m trying to make open source software available. How is this fair?
* People need proprietary software for their livelihood. Yes dual licensing or selling GPLed code is possible – but maybe not completely feasible. A developer hoping to make a living from small games cannot use GPLed libraries because that would violate the law.
* If Richard Stallman had to make a living from writing software rather than whatever he does, I’m curious how much of his code he’d really open-source.
* I believe that projects can open source re-usable components (google => protocol buffers, facebook => thrift, microsoft => asp.net/mvc).
* I will never shun anything because it’s proprietary licensing.
* While I prefer open source projects like everyone because you can take a look at the inner working, there are only nine projects who’s sources I have truly looked into with good depth.
* My idea of freedom includes the freedom to make it proprietary. It’s your code, you can do what you want with it. I prefer releasing under MIT/X11 license and that’s my choice.
* While the GPL is all about choice, it doesn’t give me any real choice. I *have* no choice
* Ironically, mono is largely GPL/LGPL as well.

My thoughts on interop and Dev productivity:

* Stop thinking about Microsoft for a second. They aren’t going away anywhere and no amount of software hippies are going to stop them.
* Open source isn’t going anywhere either. Nowhere but above and ahead.
* The mono project allows you to rapidly develop applications using a standard statically typed language and be assured of it being cross-platform.

Yes, I’ve written a little bit of code and put it out there. My new project attempts to bring Mylyn’s functionality to MonoDevelop and so far it’s pretty okay. And yes, I am an ardent vi user.

Update:

Some very nice person wrote out an entire response to my post, pointing out where I’m wrong. You can find it here. I am grateful as he/she clarified that Open Source is different from Free Software. For some reason, I can’t seem to read that much text without it being punctuated by images or code blocks.

Anyways, I repsonded and will cross-post here (man I haven’t typed this much plaintext in a while)

Thank you for englightening me. I have not the patience or the caliber to respond, and so I will concede defeat.

I have nothing to say. I honestly never did. I’m an obscure Indian student, and like writing some code now and then, playing my guitar and enjoying my college years.

Unfortunately I’m a nice person who believes in the kindness of humanity. I am never worried about patents or companies or FUD. This was nonsense to me a few months ago.

I too thought the Mono project was something bad and evil like everyone else. There was one project which I tried to hack on and contribute and really liked the Mono stack.

Unlike most of the philosophies of the GNU project, I don’t say that some things are right and some things are wrong. I feel everything is right, some are more right than the others.

What hurts me is that the linux community is at war from the inside over a core project that’s so old and mature, it’s not going to go away. Nobody wants a compromise, and flames fly left and right.

If you really like a project and want to contribute in the future to it, and someone like rms, who everyone looks up to tries to cripple it by flagging it as dangerous. Then you’ll know how I feel, let alone the people who *really* contribute to the project.

Please realize that beneath all this patent nonsense, there are *real people* who are caring enough to passionately contribute. Miguel de Icaza has been writing open source code before I even knew what computer was, and he’s still ready to answer any questions I have on IRC.

This passion to help the rest of the world without getting anything back, is almost like philanthrophy. You see it in every project, you see it in Wikipedia, you see it when people get together to work on a cause bigger than themselves.

That, to me is the spirit of Open Source – not a License or a set of rules.

Unfortunately I can’t give you answers, world peace, a solution to this whole patent issue, give rms a girlfriend (or give rms a mrs.).

Luckily, I have the next best thing for you. Here’s metallica’s “creeping death”:

Here we have a … gentleman … (a Microsoft intern and MonoDevelop contributor, in fact) expressing his “personal opinion”. Oh my, how droll! Let’s see what this bastion of rational thinking and considered opinion offers:

I believe viral copyleft licenses like GPL are evil, and I believe that software patents are more evil.

Alright! First off, my man you are an intern at a company renowned for not only using software patents aggressively, but also continues to lobby countries that do not have US-style software patents to get on board with the patent program. By your own arguments, you are working for an evil company. You’re not off to a good start, scooter.

I got a considerable bit of email from people carefully pointing out all the tiny little crevices I’m wrong in.

News flash, sparky: they aren’t “tiny little crevices”. You are piloting the Trieste straight to the floor of the Mariana Trench of Ignorance.

But wait! Here lies a noble soul:

I understand what free software and open source is and was going to use part of my first paycheck to get a student membership into the FSF.

I doubt you did understand, nor do you now, but I bet you’ve learned something. I don’t understand exactly what this means, though? You were going to get a membership? Is that before you realized that the GPL was “evil”? I mean, where you just going to join the FSF so you could whip out your member card and pretend you were some sort of hip “Open Source Dudez”? Because the FSF has pretty much always stood for the same things. GPL being one of them. So were you joining an organization you didn’t really understand, or is this something that you have recently changed your mind on, now that Stallman has laid out an entirely rational argument?

Oh, and there’s this:

People take this as an attack on the GPL or RMS.

Well, in fairness you did start off originally with “Fuck you, Richard Stallman”. It wasn’t really much of a stretch to take that as an attack. Oh, and the bit about the GPL being “evil”. A bit attack-ishy, that, as well.

But let’s get that good old-fashion reasoning! Let’s see why the GPL is “evil”:

2. I wanted to use some technology for a startup with me and my friends but that would be invalidated in terms of the license.

So, you wanted to take someone else’s hard work and profit from it, and not have to recompense them or the community that provided it. Well, guess what, the GPL prevents that – it’s sort of one of the major points of the GPL. You basically want to steal from the original programmer. In this situation there was something “evil”, but it was not the GPL. You’ll fit right in at Microsoft!

A gross ignorance of Free Software, Open Source and GPL permeates virtually every sentence of the blog, and The Mad Hatter handles the rebuttal quite well, but let’s take look at one more note of interest:

While I’m new to the mono project, it aligns perfectly with my vision that they key for great programs is interoperability and ease of development.

This is probably a lot truer than he or the mono project realizes. Time and time again, the arguments of “practicality” and “don’t concern yourself with politics” and “I’m not going to worry about that” roll off the tongues of the mono apologist. There are other important considerations beyond “interoperability” and “ease of development”.

More on that later!

Say you go into a convenience store and you shove a .357 Magnum in the guy’s face and demand his money. You have used a firearm aggressively. It doesn’t really matter that you didn’t pull the trigger – it is still armed robery.

So, when Microsoft command says things like:

We should look at even patenting the things we do add to help Office.

- Bill Gates, 1998

[On being told of the free Star Office]
An interesting development…
At some point we will have to consider the patents they violate.

- Bill Gates, 1998

Maybe we could define the APIs so that they work well with NT and not the others even if they are open. Or maybe we could patent something related to this.

- Bill Gates, 1999

What do we want in cameras for metadata and UI? What do we want relative to device discovery? (hopefully patented stuff).

- Steve Ballmer, 2003

We’ve had an issue, a problem that we’ve had to confront, which is because of the way the GPL works, and because open-source Linux does not come from a company — Linux comes from the community — the fact that that product uses our patented intellectual property is a problem for our shareholders.

- Steve Ballmer, 2006

If a customer says, Look, do we have liability for the use of your patented work? Essentially, If you’re using non-SUSE Linux, then Id say the answer is yes…I suspect that [customers] will take that issue up with their distributor. [Or if customers are considering doing a direct download of a non-SUSE Linux version] theyll think twice about that”

- Steve Ballmer, 2006

If anybody thinks open-source alternatives are free, I guess as they say, you can see me after class. [...] I will tell you that in any comparison that you would do of Windows with Linux, which is an open-source alternative, we will prove to you that when it comes to total cost of ownership our stuff is more economical, whether it’s the other patent-licensing costs that you might have to pay to use open-source software, which is kind of a big unknown right now [...]

- Steve Ballmer, 2007

Then that is Microsoft using patents aggressively.

I’m not sure why some people want to act like just because Microsoft hasn’t done the worst thing possible it means they aren’t doing anything bad at all – but you’ll see this defense a lot from mono apologists (and Microsoft apologists in general, for that matter.)

Here’s the thing about that:

I didn’t go out and ask for mono or Moonlight; I didn’t order out to get Microsoft stuffing all up in my GNU/Linux turkey.

In fact, everything was pretty much just fine until you showed up knocking at my distribution’s door, covered in the offal of the sacrifice of integrity, wiped a bit of Ballmer’s love juices off your chin and said: “Right then, give us a kiss.”

Oh-  and despite being told to go away time and time again, you just keep knocking.

Mono apologists don’t get to pretend that people being wary or critical are acting irrationally. To be cautious concerning Microsoft not paranoia, rather it is understandable, indeed crucial. It is 100% the apologist’s burden to explain and convince the community why they should buy what you are selling.

That you’ve been at it for ~9 years now and people still aren’t buying is your failure – and speaks to the value of the wares you are peddling.