I wonder who influenced the new "shared source" licenses? [LWN.net]

I wonder who influenced the new "shared source" licenses?

Posted Oct 20, 2005 5:35 UTC (Thu) by Duncan (guest, #6647)
Parent article: FSFE on the new "shared source" licenses

Is this one of the things Daniel Robbins, Gentoo founder and former head
architect, 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

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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 the
stuff 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