Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft And The GPL/LGPL
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)."
It's their code, they can licence it however they damn well please.
That's what "freedom" is all about. You get to choose how your code can be used. MS has decided, now it's up to us to honor that decision.
Otherwise, you have no right to expect anyone to respect licences like the GPL.
Normally, you would be right, but Microsoft has been found guilty of illegaly abusing a monopoly. This trial is in the penalty phase, not the "did they do it or not" phase; Microsoft is being punished.
The very heart of "punishment" means that Microsoft is going to have to do things that they do not want to. The fact that this is an anti-trust trial means that they are going to have to do things that hurt themselves and help their competition. GPL software represents some of their strongest competition, so a "punishment" that does not help GPL developers is not a punishment at all. Remember, they have been abusing their competitors and their customers.
In the past, when Microsoft did whatever they damn well pleased, they broke the law. They cannot continue to do whatever they damn well please to correct this.
Thomas Galvin
From the text of the license:
3.2 Patent License. Subject to Sections 3.3 - 3.7, Microsoft
hereby grants Company a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, personal,
transferable, non-sublicensable, license under its Necessary Claims to (1)
make, use, import, and (2) offer to sell, sell and distribute, directly or
indirectly, to End Users, Company Implementations that fully comply with the
Technical Reference. The above license is limited to implementing the CIFS
communication protocol itself, and does not include any express or implied
licenses or other rights to any underlying technology (operating system
technology, local file system technology, etc.) that may be used to make a
complete file server or other CIFS compatible device.
Reciprocal Patent License. To the extent Company owns,
controls or can sublicense without payment of a fee to an unaffiliated third
party, any patents that are required for Microsoft or its licensees to
implement CIFS as set forth in the Technical Reference and distribute such
implementations, Microsoft and its licensees are hereby granted a license to
such patents solely for the purpose of implementing CIFS as set forth in the
Technical Reference and distributing such implementations.
If I understand this correctly, Microsoft is claiming patent rights (5,265,261
and 5,437,013) on technology related to implementing CIFS. Basically they're saying "everybody can use our patents royalty-free as long as it's not part of (L)GPL'ed software." Essentially this is a patent license, not a software or documentation license. The "technical reference" is just along for the ride--also free under the same terms. I predicted this about 2 years ago--that Microsoft would turn to software patents after realizing that GPL software was undefeatable by any other means. This is their first attempt.
It seems there are 3 options:
1.) Develop CIFS software outside the US, ignore the patent for use within the US.
2.) Develop a CIFS module for Samba under the BSD license (license compatibility?)
3.) Develop CIFS software at will and ignore M$ altogether.
All three cases probably require some degree of civil disobedience for US citizens--in the form of not honoring software patents. I say go for it. This could become the first time M$ ever legally fought individuals, and believe me--it could raise such a stink in public opinion that it destroys them completely.
Can anybody explain to me how Microsoft can allow BSD software to use their license while forbiding GPL? Since BSD software can be re-licensed under any other license (the property that MS likes), why couldn't it be re-licensed under the GPL. In other words, what would prevent me from writing a very small BSD program that just used the MS doc but doesn't really do anything useful, and then re-license it under the GPL.
Or probably better, all the MS interoperation code could be put in a BSD library (since there'd be nothing innovative in that part, MS won't even bother) and then link all kinds of GPL programs to that library. Does that make sense?
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
All reimplementations of this then will be released under a different license that is an exact copy of GPL, plus an additional clause that Microsoft or any entity that is owned by Microsoft is prohibited from using it. Technically it will be perfectly ok under Microsoft's license -- it's not GPL at all, it's not even compatible with GPL.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.