IT News & Technology update

Microsoft apologize regarding opensource violation inside CodePlex project

Written by IT News on 11:00 PM

After protest from various constituencies in the last few days, Microsoft has pulled from its site CodePlex Sandcastle project for non-compliance with the terms and conditions necessary to qualify as a good-fide open source.

Sandcastle is documentation compiler for managed class libraries, which is labeled available within Microsoft permission license, one of the two Initiative approved open source licenses under which Microsoft provides access to its source code.

Sam Ramji, head of Microsoft's open source and Linux team published one vazhvalyavaneto on behalf of Microsoft for OSI of Microsoft Port 25 blog on 6 June. He said on his instructions, Sandcastle was terminated, effective immediately, from Microsoft's CodePlex code-repository site. If and when you SandCastle team agreed to publish the source code, the project may be reposted in the future, said Ramji.

Below is the text grabbed from Ramji’s blog:

“A number of people have alerted me in the last 24 hours that a Microsoft project called Sandcastle, located on Codeplex, used the Ms-PL and called itself ‘open source’ yet never posted the source code.

“This is unacceptable and represents a violation of Microsoft’s Open Source policy. I take it extremely seriously….

“I apologize to the OSI on behalf of Microsoft for this mistake.”

In the first hearing rumblings over Sandcastle licensing earlier this week, I was suspected Microsoft was willing to risk to the anger of OSI for documentation compiler. It's good to see Ramji & Co. do the right thing here.