Tuesday, 16 October 2007
Not all code released under the Ms-PL and Ms-RL will be open source.
« Mobile at last, dang | Main | Halloween and current developments »As I alluded to, without letting the cat exactly out of the bag, OSI approved two MS license. I liked Microsoft's blog statement on the matter and I have to say that I didn't care for Matt Asay's statement. Matt's posts frequently trouble me in that they confuse Open Source licensing with open source. Meaning you can use an open source license...and produce non-open source. The simplest way is to patent some technology or knowingly produce software that uses a (valid) patent by someone else and restrict how that patent is licensed in a way that is incongruent with open source. The cool thing about Microsoft's licenses is that they appear to confer such patents (where owned by MS). On the other hand, you can also do things like SuperWaba did and shut down your community site. The tough thing here is that it is less obvious in some ways. On one hand, the source to SuperWaba isn't readily available or developed in the open nor is it indeed easy to get at the binaries. It has the look, feel and smell of a proprietary product (they even make you register to download it), but is GPL. No way that is open source. Microsoft may end up throwing binaries over the wall, make the source hard to get at and potentially even license the binaries under other licenses. They might open source license that without actually doing open source development or distribution per se. This wouldn't be unique to Microsoft, so don't pick on them here, I'm just saying don't do what Matt Asay does, occasionally in his writing, and confuse open source licensing with open source.
Technorati Tags: open source OSI Microsoft Ms-PL Ms-RL
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