Releasing the Source Code for the .NET Framework Libraries!

After programming with MFC (a lot!) and writing the ATL book, it was *very* difficult for me to live in a world without the source code to figure out how something was working. All of us have since moved over to Lutz's most excellent Reflector, but that's still no substitute for actually stepping in and now ScottGu has announced that we'll have the ability to browse and debug with the .NET library source code, integrated into VS2008:

Wahoo!

@ Tzury Bar Yochay
The source is NOT open. It is just viewable. The source is still 100% copyright Microsoft, with all rights reserved.

@Chris Sells
Have you considered that by posting this screenshot with the MS Code in it, you are actually violating MS's copyright to this source code? You are.

Read the MS-Restrictive License. You have no right to republish this code. This is the same as posting a clip of a song by your favorite music artist. It is a copyright violation.

Opening these sources is going to be a nightmare for Microsoft in terms of enforcing their copyrights.

Yeah....apparently they're going to go after Scott Gu as well.

(It took me two seconds to realize the image came from his post).

So what does this mean.. we can't post .NET source code anywhere if we're discussing it?

Not so sure about US laws but I'm Fairly sure that Fair use laws here allow republishing and copying recognizable segments without infringing/paying anything.

That's how it works in the music, you can play those short clips without issues.

Now if I reposted a whole class.cs would that still be fine as it's not the whole product just a tiny part of it.. Hard to say.

But actually. Is this about copyright? Or the license? If you accept the license I guess you can't republish the code. Now if you get your hands on the code some other way (say, regedit a value to disable the EULA..) then it would fall under the copyright.