hi I took a brief look at powershell today when I found out it had been open sourced. I looked at some of the c# source code files and they all read that they're licensed under the apache license, version 2.0. I haven't read that thing, it's probably full of legalese I wouldn't understand, but I bet it's probably lax on the patent front or microsoft wouldn't have chosen it. So we could, theoretically, get into trouble packaging it for arch, although I don't think it's likely. Of course I am not a lawyer or a programmer, this is just my two scents. Thanks Kendell Clark On 08/19/2016 10:47 AM, Sebastiaan Lokhorst via arch-general wrote:
2016-08-19 17:36 GMT+02:00 Jayesh Badwaik <archlinux@jayeshbadwaik.in>:
The point was patents.
A company can give out licenses to use a patent. If Microsoft would have patented stuff in PowerShell, but then releases them with the following license included:
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software ... Then Microsoft has given you a license to use that patent under the conditions listed above, and they cannot sue you.
Please correct me if I'm mistaken.