Microsoft is apparently serious about its efforts to adhere to the letter of the Open Source Definition and is now set to relaunch its Sandcastle effort as a result. Nearly a month ago Microsoft pulled the Sandcastle project from its CodePlex site because it was listed as being open source (under the OSI approved Ms-PL) when in fact it wasn’t because it didn’t adhere to the licensing terms of open source. Sandcastle which is a documentation compiler for managed class
libraries did not have source code open and available for download.
Sam Ramji who runs Microsoft’s Open Source Lab has now confirmed on his blog that Sandcastle is now set to re-appear on CodePlex as a fully compliant open source project.
This was a non-trivial effort and I applaud them for it. I think these
actions demonstrate Microsoft’s desire to abide by the OSI’s Open
Source Definition with regard to source code when releasing open source
projects on CodePlex.
This is a positive turn of events in my view. Certainly there are many within Microsoft who couldn’t care less about open source, fortunately Sam Ramji isn’t one of them.
