Sharing ASP.NET MVC applications

Question

Like everybody else on this planet, I am currently working on a blogging engine using ASP.NET MVC .

I am planning to make this open source under GPL, with a requirement that people already have ASP.NET 3.5 already installed on their machines. Let us say that they do not already have ASP.NET MVC installed (on a shared host)

But, I would like them to host my application inspite of that.

I found this interesting post here by Haack http://haacked.com/archive/2008/11/03/bin-deploy-aspnetmvc.aspx , which suggests to include the below references in Bin directory

• System.Web.Mvc
• System.Web.Routing
• System.Web.Abstractions

My question is, Is it legal for me to include these assemblies in the bin directory when sharing the application?

Thanks, Chandra

Answer 1

Since ASP.NET MVC is released under the Microsoft Public License, you can read more here http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ms-pl.html

I'd say that'd be perfectly legal. It is open source after all.

You can also read some more about the license here: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ms-pl.html

Answer 2

Yes it is. These are redistributable assemblies.

The license is MS-PL, an open source license from Microsoft that allows redistribution.

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/04/01/asp-net-mvc-1-0.aspx

The only catch is that it's not compatible with GPL, so you may want to think of using a different open source license for your project.