[e1ven]

Fair enough, those sound like awesome projects. The difference between the MS license and most OSS licenses is that this does not include redistribution.

I'm a proponent of OSS, and if MS wanted to release this under MIT that'd be great.. But I have a hard time thinking of projects that are stopped by the current license.

My guess is that creating a visualization would be a rather transformative use of the work - Redistributing your resulting visualization would likely be firmly in fair use territory.

Comparing the code for modularity is writing an essay. You don't need a redistribution license for the code to do that.

In any event, I hope they do eventually release using an open license. But as a fan of the history of our industry, I'm glad they released it at all.