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A Slightly-Softer Microsoft Shared Source License

Posted by timothy on from the just-initial-here-and-here-and-here-and-here dept.

RadBlock writes "Microsoft Watch has a story on a recent change in Microsoft's shared-source licensing... I guess the main difference is that programmers do not have to send back any changes made to the source code. But they can't combine any of the Microsoft code with other software. Here's the full text of their new license agreement." The article claims that Microsoft is "inching closer -- at least in spirit -- to the GNU GPL" with these license tweaks, but it doesn't look that way to me.

3 of 342 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Rights? by nurightshu · · Score: 4, Funny

    As best I can tell, many of the zealots here think they have the "right" to the fruits of any programmer or company's labor, simply because it's trivial to make copies of the original work. I've been reading /. myself since '99 or so (I still remember Geeks in Space), and it seems that around here, Richard Stallman's belief that all code should be free for anyone to use or modify somehow reflects actual reality.

    Of course, the reality of the situation is that the author of the work has the right (not "right") to release or distribute his work however he sees fit; this of course gives rise to the infantile bawling over how company x (where x usually equals "Microsoft") is the root of all evil, responsible for the Kennedy assassination, the Challenger and Columbia incidents, and just about anything bad that has happened to them personally in their entire lives.

    Since Microsoft is only releasing code under the terms of a license the zealots feel is draconian, it is of course an egregious abridgement of the zealots' "right" to get the latest 0day_winXP_hax0r3d.iso.

    Hope this helps.

    --
    They that would sacrifice their .sig space for that cliched Franklin quote deserve neither.
  2. Microsoft is noble. by rice_burners_suck · · Score: 4, Funny
    I have read each word of the new Microsoft license and firmly believe that it is superior in all ways to the viral GPL license which plagues so much software that is forced onto the modern consumer through the power of monopoly.

    Contrary to such atrocities against humanity and the larger population of the world, the Microsoft license liberates every person by empowering them to use high quality tools for crashing computers at ten times the price, while simultaneously giving them the power to do almost as much as nothing in terms of repairing problems that arise when the liberation software fails (in other words, when it actually works properly and thus does not fulfill its purpose of crashing the aforementioned computer), thus creating value for the consumer and keeping the economy strong.

    If the open source world actually used its brain, every developer of open source software would sign his intellectual property over to Microsoft for free, on the sole condition that Microsoft will also take away everything that person owns and leave them hungry in the streets.

    Microsoft is such a noble and ethical entity that most developers would die to defend it.

  3. Re:Inching closer? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny
    So "Lindows" seems to be trying to take over the desktop from "MS-Windows".

    What will be the name of the MS product that will 'take on' Linux?

    Windux? Linows?

    Which one: WedHat? Webian? Wackware? Wandrake? Wuse? WurboLinux?

    And do they put the source on wourceforge and adhere to WOSIX and the WSB? Add linux support with Line (Line Is Not an Emulator)?

    Sendlook? exmail? IIPache? Wnome? IEzilla/Woenix? wonqueror? wautilus? Wamba? WaTeX? MSimian Outvolooktion? win3fs? weiserfs? waid5? werl? wython? msSQL?(oops)

    Politically correct WNU/Windows?

    Dary I say Lincrosoft? Microsux?

    Hope they do. Imitation is the best flattery.


    Washdot?