[mikestew]

It's entirely unreasonable for them to demand access to source code.

The government and large corporations apparently disagree, or Microsoft wouldn't have their Shared Source Initiative. And for any nay-sayers in the crowd, that should be all that need be known: Microsoft thinks it's okay, and they have a lot more to lose than you do.

The only legitimate thing is to have something in case you fail and they have "banked" on you.

Which might be the exact thing they're trying to avoid. If your "machine learning" algorithm amounts to a bunch of nested if statements, they'd probably rather not "bank on you" in the first place.

[kjksf]

Bringing up Microsoft is neither here nor there.

Microsoft made the decision to create Shared Source Initiative only after they were very successful and only after a very, VERY detailed cost vs. benefit analysis.

Furthermore, they are handsomely paid for it (e.g in order to be eligible, you need to pay for at least 10k Windows licenses as per https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/enterprise-sour...) and it's ultimately up to Microsoft to grant/deny access.

And since we're talking about Microsoft, in the early days they were infamous for pumping competition for technical information under the guise of due diligence and then crushing said competition by developing competing products.

The person who asked the question is clearly not at the "successful monopoly" stage as Microsoft but more in the "there are legitimate concerns someone might steal our core ip" stage.

[dv_dt]

Microsoft also has enough legal resources to assure recompense for any license or ip violations...

[akoncius]

well I presume that MS does not provide access to code to direct competitors. Which is OP’s concern- client is building ML team and so on and they ask access to code.

National agencies such as FBI are not threat to MS to become competitor, unlike OP’s client.