Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Microsoft And The GPL/LGPL

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the polluting-the-water dept.

AnimeFreak writes "In this CNET news article, it talks about how Microsoft's new license that will allow competing companies to read-over software code for their products does not allow software covered under the GPL/LGPL licensing agreement (such as Linux, SAMBA, and Mozilla)."

2 of 573 comments (clear)

  1. Re:This is about *Software Patents* by Jeremy+Allison+-+Sam · · Score: 5, Informative

    We (the Samba Team) don't think Samba infringes on these patents. We've looked at them.

    The problem is it doesn't matter what we think, it matters what lawyers think of this.

    We're currently getting a legal opinion on this and will post a more complete statement once we've done so.

    Regards,

    Jeremy Allison,
    Samba Team.

  2. Re:Brain Control? by doug363 · · Score: 5, Informative
    The passage says:
    1.4 "IPR Impairing License" shall mean the GNU General Public License, the GNU Lesser/Library General Public License, and any license that requires in any instance that other software distributed with software subject to such license (a) be disclosed and distributed in source code form; (b) be licensed for purposes of making derivative works; or (c) be redistributable at no charge.

    Note that if either (a), (b), OR (c) is true, then the license is an "IPR impairing license". Also, it is possible to sublicense some software in a way that would make it fall under the definition of an "IPR impairing license". In the main passage of the license text, it says:

    ...Company shall not distribute any Company Implementation in any manner that would subject such Company Implementation to the terms of an IPR Impairing License.
    So something like public domain software, which can be sublicensed as BSD, GPL etc. is out as well.