MS is open-sourcing PDB format

Re:MS is open-sourcing PDB format by Hydraulix989 on Friday October 30, 2015 @04:27PM (#10480342)

To be clear, what was "open sourced" was a C header file containing struct definitions and parsing functions for that file format.

An implementation could be considered one way of providing a format/protocol specification.

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Re:MS is open-sourcing PDB format by dozzie on Friday October 30, 2015 @05:26PM (#10480637)

> "open sourced" was a C header file [...]

Indeed. In my opinion too little to call it a day, but I haven't worked on implementing file handling, so I may be wrong here.

> An implementation could be considered one way of providing a format/protocol specification.

Not quite. Look at OpenVPN, which has hilarious situation: code is open, but protocol is effectively closed. You can't practically derive the protocol from OpenVPN's source (yes, I tried that). Unless you can put weeks of effort, of course.

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Re:MS is open-sourcing PDB format by analognoise on Friday October 30, 2015 @07:29PM (#10481165)

So it's a closed protocol because it's hard to understand? That doesn't seem to make much sense.

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Re:MS is open-sourcing PDB format by dozzie on Saturday October 31, 2015 @04:26AM (#10482171)

No. It's closed because there's no specification or even an alternative implementation and you can't easily derive one.

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