Microsoft has recently created a Wiki for MSDN documentation … but they’ve woven two content licenses together in a way that’s sure to cause much confusion. And on top of that, they have a seperate contribution agreement (asserting that if you contribute code, you retain copyright, but give Microsoft license to publish and sub-license it). And then, on top of that, they have a Code of Conduct. Finally … the whole site — and apparently, the actual MSDN content — seems to be governed under yet another license which seems to prohibit sharing code and non-commercial use.
If you can make your way through all of that … then you can sign up to add content to MSDN! And maybe, just maybe, you can use user-contributed sample code (if anyone submits any) in your own (non-GPL) applications.
I kind-of like the idea, even though this isn’t so much a “wiki” as it is MSDN + comments. It’s like the PHP.net documentation: the MSDN content isn’t editable. But on MSDN, anyone can edit content that others have added (instead of just adding their own content as on PHP.net), which means that there’s no guarantee user-contributed code will work — since anyone could break it after it’s added. And the “add content” form doesn’t work in Firefox. Not in the sense that it’s broken, but in the sense that they prevent you from adding content using Firefox.
But the licensing and click-through agreements are completely out of hand. User contributed “source code” is licensed under the very open Microsoft Permissive license which basically just requires you “retain all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices that are present in the [code].” From my point of view, this isn’t a problem — although some GPL hawks find fault with the attribution requirement, it’s unlikely to apply since most contributors will presumably not put copyright statements in sample code they contribute… However, user-contributed “text” is licensed seperately under a Creative Commons Attibution Non-commercial (not share-alike) license. The non-commercial piece means that you should be extra careful using information from user comments unless it’s clearly “sample code” ... And Microsoft contributed code seems to be under yet a third license. On top of all that, all of this is presented on a single page with that standard Microsoft copyright statement at the bottom, and when you try to contribute content there are not separate forms for “code” versus “text” ... so it’s going to be really confusing to figure out whether or not you can use any particular bit…
We’ll see what happens as time goes on, and in the meantime, I’ll give them the benefit of the “beta doubt” and hope this can all be smoothed out (and that they’ll fix Firefox contributing soon).
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I’ve always thought that the biggest failure of MSDN was a lack of general use examples. For example, CreateWindowEx should have some code to create a generic window. If users are allowed to submit comments, then hopefully some kind souls will fill this gap.