Re: [ros-dev] Legal advice concerning contribution to ReactOS

[David Quintana (gigaherz)]

Hello,

First of all, I'm not qualified to give you a definitive answer, and
anything I say is only my personal belief. I'm not a lawyer or anything
close to one. I'm jsut writing to give you an approximation of an answer
while you wait for the proper answer by someone who is qualified.

I believe that the idea of the restriction is to both prevent breaching of
"non-compete" clauses in contracts, and to prevent the situation in which
the contributions to ReactOS as seen as having been done by "abusing" the
knowledge obtained while you have direct access to Microsoft's internal
information.

The best ReactOS will be able to say about this, is if your contribution
would be legally welcome. You still may want to verify on your end if you
would have any troubles by providing such contributions.

I repeat that I'm just a lowly contributor and my words are not legal
advice.

Thanks for the interest. :)



On 18 March 2017 at 13:21, <tobias.k(a)posteo.de> wrote:

>   Hi, I've a question concerning legal restrictions.
> As mentioned on this
>  page
>
>  https://reactos.org/wiki/Subversion#Prerequisites
>
>  I'm not allowed to contribute to ReactOS when I'm an employee of Microsoft
>  or of any subsidiary of Microsoft.
>
>  In the past, I worked for a German company which was a Certified Partner
>  of Microsoft. As far as I know, it was not a subsidiary of Microsoft. It's
>  not even listed here
>
>  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio
>  ns_by_Microsoft
>
>  (but I don't know if this list is complete).
>
>  Since a Certified Partner is not automatically a MS subsidiary or
>  equivalent to it in a sense (as I think), there shouldn't be a problem for
>  me contributing to ReactOS. Is there anybody who can confirm that?
>
>  Tobias
>
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