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