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FSFE on the new "shared source" licenses
[for immediate release]
FSFE: Early comment on new Microsoft Shared Source Licenses
"Since we so rarely have opportunity to say something positive about
Microsoft, let me begin by congratulating them", says Georg Greve,
president of Free Software Foundation Europe. "Microsoft finally seems
to have made a step forward on their long march towards giving their
users freedom: of the five licenses published, our cursory first
analysis suggests that two of them indeed fulfill the Free Software
Definition."
According to FSFEs first glance, the "Microsoft Permissive License"
(Ms-PL) and "Microsoft Community License" (Ms-CL) both appear to
satisfy the four freedoms that define Free Software. In particular:
The Ms-CL also appears to implement a variation of the Copyleft idea,
which was first implemented by the GNU General Public License (GPL).
Given previous Microsoft statements about the Copyleft approach and in
particular the GNU GPL as 'viral', 'cancerous' and 'communist', seeing
Microsoft now publish licenses applying the very same principles seems
quite an evolution.
Naturally, it is not the publication of licenses, but the publication
of software under a Free Software license, that gives people freedom:
It is indeed not very useful if every company, administration or
author publishes their own license; so it would have been preferrable
if Microsoft had made the decision to use the GNU General Public
License (GPL) and Lesser General Public License (LGPL) for its Shared
Source program.
Far more than 50% of Free Software worldwide is published under these
licenses, they are very well-known and people trust them for good
reason.
"Microsoft has walked a mile and is now standing mere inches from the
GNU (L)GPL: We fully understand that Microsoft is first trying to get
the nail of its little toe wet in the Free Software community, and we
welcome that," continues Greve. "But in the course of time we would
prefer to see Microsoft join the large global community of commercial
GNU (L)GPL vendors."
"For now it will be good if Microsoft starts relicensing its portfolio
under the Ms-PL or Ms-CL; but we still have to warn people to be
careful about the 'Shared Source' label and look at the specific
licenses: The other three licenses of the Shared Source program are
clearly proprietary and obviously do not qualify as Free Software."
Greve finishes.
The Free Software Foundations will need more time to study all these
licenses and their interactions with other licenses in depth, so this
is not a final evaluation -- and the final evaluation may as well
reveal problems that were not visible at first sight.
Microsoft still has a long way to go, but for now it seems they made a
step in the right direction, and the Free Software Foundation Europe
hopes they will keep it up.
About the Free Software Foundation Europe:
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), founded 2001, is a
charitable non-governmental organisation dedicated to all aspects of
Free Software in Europe. Access to software determines who may
participate in a digital society. The the Freedoms to use, copy,
modify and redistribute software - as described in the Free Software
definition - allow equal participation in the information
age. Creating awareness for these issues, securing Free Software
politically and legally, and giving people Freedom by supporting
development of Free Software are central issues of the FSFE.
Further information about FSFE's work can be found at
http://fsfeurope.org, get active yourself at
http://fsfeurope.org/contribute/.
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The folks at Forbes are about to have their little minds blown Posted Oct 19, 2005 19:27 UTC (Wed) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] Microsoft put out a copyleft license? Have the communists won?Still, better have Prof. Moglen check for gotchas.
The folks at Forbes are about to have their little minds blown Posted Oct 19, 2005 20:12 UTC (Wed) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] It remains to be seen whether they actually release anything under these licenses, or whether they release anything interesting under them. I wouldn't be too surprised if they released some stuff they no longer what to deal with under the PL or CL one, to reduce worries about what will happen to your data when Microsoft decides to discard the only software that can read it.
Since MS no longer want to deal with Win98SE... Posted Oct 20, 2005 2:05 UTC (Thu) by leonbrooks (guest, #1494) [Link] ...I look forward to solving many mysteries when it's released under an MS-CopyLeft licence soon. (-:
The folks at Forbes are about to have their little minds blown Posted Oct 20, 2005 3:21 UTC (Thu) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link] If they DO release ancient abandonware, it might still be of some use. Who knows what peoplemay still have hanging around on ancient floppies, written with archaic DOS-based programs that now can't be run?
FSFE on the new "shared source" licenses Posted Oct 19, 2005 21:10 UTC (Wed) by dmh (guest, #14528) [Link] A very interesting development.
I notice that all the licences have an MPL-ish patent clause (whereby patent litigation terminates both the patent grant and the copyright grant), so they won't be compatible with GPL v2.
FSFE on the new "shared source" licenses Posted Oct 19, 2005 21:23 UTC (Wed) by danieldk (guest, #27876) [Link] Maybe, as someone said earlier, it fully depends on what they plan to license under these licenses. Maybe they finally got it, and we can start to discuss what licenses are more and less communist ;).
FSFE on the new "shared source" licenses Posted Oct 19, 2005 22:39 UTC (Wed) by xtifr (subscriber, #143) [Link] Well, on the one hand, I'm impressed that MS managed to come up with something even vaguely acceptable. On the other hand--yet another license? AAAGH! What the @%#& was wrong with the various licenses that are already available? Sheesh! :)
It's obvious what's wrong Posted Oct 19, 2005 23:31 UTC (Wed) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] these bad licenses have been written by Evil People.
Seriously: having decried the GPL as Evil, Communist, and Threatening Corporate America, releasing software under the GPL would be too much hypocrisy even for M$.
That being said, let's see what they actually release under these licenses, if anything. I'm not exactly holding my breath.
Too much hypocrisy? For Microsoft? Posted Oct 20, 2005 2:06 UTC (Thu) by leonbrooks (guest, #1494) [Link] Are you sure that's possible? (-:
It's obvious what's wrong Posted Oct 20, 2005 3:07 UTC (Thu) by hbo (guest, #13692) [Link] No, creating their own GPL-like license is the hypocritical act. It's hypocritical because they are doing one thing - creating a GPL-like license - and saying another - equating the GPL with communism. Adopting the GPL would be admitting rhetorical defeat and changing position, but their words and deeds would have to align in that case.
Wouldn't they? 8)
I wonder who influenced the new "shared source" licenses? Posted Oct 20, 2005 5:35 UTC (Thu) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link] Is this one of the things Daniel Robbins, Gentoo founder and former headarchitect, has been working on at MS, now that he's an employee there? Back when the news that he was going to work there went public, there were many cries of "traitor!" here. Having seen what occurred with the Gentoo/Zynot fork, and how DRobbins behaved himself there (an investigation that only confirmed my decision to switch to Gentoo, BTW), and seeing MS say but not quite believing they had accepted Linux and were reaching out, I was willing to take a wait and see attitude. I didn't trust MS but thought it less likely DRobbins had gone to the dark side, and more likely they had fooled him and that somewhere down the line he'd be leaving and there'd be a lot of bad blood. If that /were/ to be the case, I figured he was probably in good company, given the whole Mono thing and the suspicions many (yours truly included) still have about MS' intentions there. If he was being fooled, he certainly wasn't the only one in the community being fooled. This is a hopeful sign that it's not quite as bad as all that -- that something different really /is/ happening. As others have said, it's definitely still a game of "wait and see", given MS has yet to release anything under the licenses and it could be nothing or only insignificant stuff released. Still, it would appear there's reason to hope my worst suspicions were pestimistic, and my wait and see attitude turned out to be the right one. I feel I'm in significantly more company with that attitude now, tho. =8^) ... As an exercise, consider what your reaction to the news that Raymond and Perens were talking to Netscape, or if it would have been announced they were now NS employees, before the MPL and the open sourcing of the Netscape code was announced... Certainly, they didn't have the repeated terrible history MS has, by a long shot, but who would have dared predict it would turn out like it did? Duncan
I wonder who influenced the new "shared source" licenses? Posted Oct 20, 2005 11:17 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] Microsoft has released several press statements to the effect that they love open source software now... just as long as people use it on Windows.
... and probably with Microsoft tools. They seem to have decided not to care what license the developers release it with, as long as they release it for Windows.
developers, developers, developers, developers...
It's probably a good thing for Microsoft. Then again SCO when they started to see the dark cloud coming they began releasing OSS software and supporting OSS development tools themselves, and that isn't working out that well. It's just making it easier for people to migrate to Linux.
I wonder who influenced the new "shared source" licenses? Posted Oct 20, 2005 12:30 UTC (Thu) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link] Certainly so. One of the licenses even is "open" only as long as thestuff built using it is built for MSWormOS only, no other platforms allowed or it's breaking the license. Of course, there's the distinction between "open" and "free" once again... The cynic would say that's about as liberal as most of their "sharing" is going to be. (Hmm... I'm emerging KDE 3.5.0-b2 right now, and just realized "cinic" wasn't red-flagged as spelt incorrectly, tho it looked wrong... I caught that, but wonder what others I'm missing, now. <g> The problem is likely because I have the new kdelibs already merged, but not the new kspell stuff, so there's probably a minor incompatibility ATM.) I'll say MS might surprise us. Yes, I'd still be surprised, but that'd be a good thing! =8^) What I actually think will happen will be that they'll keep the "crown jewels" pretty tight, and only let minor stuff out beyond that MSWormOS only barrier -- at least the next couple years. What they'll do beyond that as the Linux bite actually begins to be felt, I don't know... It could be they reverse course as fast as they did on the internet thing. (The optimist would of course believe that they aren't dumb enough to wait so long this time and that we might actually see core code "freed" within two to three years...) Actually, this hit /. some while b4 it hit LWN, and while I've found a higher and higher majority of comments not worth reading lately, one poster had a /really/ interesting point, that just /might/ have some serious significance. His idea was that this might be part of the MS countermoves to the open formats thing others started but Mass. really may have opened up. Say MS releases under one of the "free" licenses the format code to every MSOffice version 1995 and earlier, and sets up some legal foundation that gets the newer formats in trust (along with any related patents, thus giving up a non-trivial period of potential patent returns, but the conventional wisdom is that many such patents are defensive anyway, not really taken with the intent to earn money on), with a binding agreement to open them 10 years after initial release (so the 97 stuff would open in 2K7, etc). Note, however, that even if they did this, those licenses retain patent trigger language similar to the MPL, so they wouldn't lose all privileges (given privileges, NOT "rights"!) related to them. I could see MS doing something like that -- safely far enough back so it didn't hamper their current forced upgrading in any way, but at the same time providing a solid answer to the /real/ open formats. They might even make it 7 years out, on office format type stuff, since they still get some protection out of the related patents against direct attack, and that would still be out of support/revenue range, yet just enough so to argue that there'd be no danger to public document access since some could still be in limited use when the lockup period expired. What would /really/ be interesting, and could /really/ change the landscape, not all in "good" ways from our perspective, would be if they'd do something similar for their OSs. Imagine all of Win3.x and MSDOS being laid open, with 98 soon to follow. Even if they held back on NT for awhile, due to its more direct lineage to eXPrivacy, it'd still rock the foundations of the software world. What's most interesting about it is that in exactly the third world countries where MS is facing the worst threats from free software, a move like this would benefit them most, considering that's the age of some of the hardware they are running! Were MS to do something like this, it would DEFINITELY liven up the race a bit. After all, even modern Linux/FLOSS generally has trouble on equipment /that/ old (386/486, 4 or 8 MB RAM, <256MB hard drive), and run an ancient enough Linux/BSD distribution to run on it, and the MS software of the period competes quite well! Still, I've seen no sign yet that MS is planning anything /that/ bold, nor that they are back-against-the-wall far enough to yet seriously consider it. If they DID, however, it would certainly shake up the software world as we know it, no doubt about it! Duncan
Where are they? Posted Oct 21, 2005 0:14 UTC (Fri) by bignose (subscriber, #40) [Link] The press release discusses these new licenses, but gives no indication of where they are. Are they only available to the FSFE? Did someone forget a URL?
here's a link Posted Oct 21, 2005 23:08 UTC (Fri) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] Here's one: Microsoft Permissive License.
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