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Microsoft License Goes to OSI But Not From Redmond
An anonymous reader writes "eWeek is reporting that a Microsoft Shared Source license, the Microsoft Community License, was submitted to the Open Source Initiative for official approval, but it wasn't Microsoft who submitted it. The license it appears was submitted by John Cowan, who is a programmer and blogger and who also volunteers for the Chester County InterLink, a non-profit founded in 1993 by former OSI president Eric Raymond and Jordan Seidel. Needless to say, the OSI contacted Microsoft to see if it should evaluate the license anyway, and was told to drop it."
What next, are "we" going to start submitting bogus press releases, and trying to hold Microsoft to them? (I know that one is a little of an extrapolation, but not a huge deal.)
On the plus side, open source windows would probably have a TON of exploits at first, but eventually get secured to some degree -- despite the fact that the security model is fundamentally flawed..
Obliterate advertising!
Undoubtedly the reason it was submitted is so that the license will be officially recognized as not achieving OSI compliance. I don't think they should have asked Microsoft at all.
In all honesty, this is little more than a gimmick and frankly few give a damn about OSI.
As far as I'm concerned it just shows how much OSS advocates are out of touch with the software community at large.
In other words; it shows that loudmouths in the OSS community are really just small minded jackasses and those who see this as "important" are easily dismissed as fanatics and zealots.
The more I see of open source as a community the more I want to distance myself from it.
Since Microsoft aren't required to use any specific license for any specific product, and since a product can be "open source" and under multiple licenses that include non-open ones (eg: the Windows version of the Qt toolkit, for the longest time) and "non-free" ones (virtually all other dual-licensing cases), the argument that Microsoft would be limited in some way obviously doesn't apply.
Furthermore, since if the license HAD been deemed acceptable by the OSI, Microsoft could have claimed a massive PR coup over competitors who claim it is hostile to opening up code in any kind of meaningful way (as per EU lawsuit), it follows that Microsoft either did not want to claim such openness (which would make no sense, given how busy they are in claiming that they are perfectly open enough) OR they feared a bad PR reaction in the event of a rejection OR the license is deliberately intended NOT to be OSI-compliant but is intended to confer that impression to those corporations, countries, continents, etc, that have demanded greater openness in the software industry.
Those Slashdotters living in Europe whose European MPs are sympathetic to Open Source (or hostile to Microsoft - works in either case) may wish to notify their EuroMPs of Microsoft's request that the OSI not look closely at their terms and conditions. At worst, the EuroMP won't do anything, so it can't hurt. At best, it may be very useful ammunition the EU can use against Microsoft in Microsoft's tedious appeals - it's going to be harder for Microsoft to claim compliance with the EU court ruling on providing technical information for analysis if they won't even provide the license for the technical information to be analysed and prohibit the analysis even when the license is provided anyway.
(Hey, the EU does a lot of crappy things, makes strange drug-induced choices, and is rife with power-plays and nefarious dealings. The least we can do is exploit all that so that one of the few sensible rulings is actually upheld.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Microsoft has claimed that their various licenses are pretty open, and it makes sense to put that to the test. The OSI is the natural organization to do that. There is a good chance that there are hidden traps in their licenses and potential users need to know about that. And, of course, it is just the case where a company has deliberately hidden something in their licenses that they would object to having their license reviewed by OSI.
OSI's decision erodes confidence in OSI. If they want to be seen as a dependable arbiter of whether licenses comply with open source principles, they must evaluate licenses that have some importance in the market, no matter who actually submits the license for review. Asking the original author of the license for permission is not acceptable.
The OSS zealot of open source is "Source code that anyone can get for free." However a more literal definition might be "Source code that is available to others than the people that wrote it." Just because someone doesn't give you their code for free, or allow you to do what you please with it doesn't mean that it isn't open. There are many open standards like that. They are open, in that anyone can get them, but you've got to pay for licensing.
However that's not really relevant here. MS's Shared Source license isn't OSS and they don't bill it as such. It's there so that certain groups, mostly governments and research institutions but also software partners, can get a license of MS's code to look at. They aren't licensing it for resale, it's for research and testing.
In the case of the Community License here it would mostly be for companies wishing to make extensions to MS software. If you wanted to make something that needed source access (for example Diskeeper back in the NT 3.1 days) and waned to sell that, you'd need to get this particular license.
None of their Shared Source things are shall-issue. You contact them and talk about why you want it and what for. If they like that, they'll discuss costs.
MS has no interest in its licenses being used by other people. They aren't in the business of writing a license for everyone, or dealing with potential fallout of that. It is for them to license their software when they wish to do so. Thus they aren't interested in the OSI picking it up. It doesn't benefit them at all to have a standard made of it.
Nothing is stopping you from using it as a reference for writing your own license, of course.
When the author of a license submits his license to be approved by a body such as OSI, the intent is to get that body to approve the license. Part of the process is that if the body rejects the license, the body informs the author of the reasons so that the author can, if he wishes, make adjustments to the license and resubmit it. This is an interactive process between the author and the license-approving body. At no point in the process does the license-approving body declare to the world, "WE HAVE REJECTED THIS LICENSE!!"; "WE HAVE REJECTED THIS RESUBMITTED VERSION OF THE LICENSE"; "WE HAVE REJECTED THIS RE-RESUBMITTED VERSION OF THE LICENSE"; and so on. Rather, they communicate privately with the author on the problems they have with the license and resubmissions and so-on.
What you wanted to happen was for OSI to, on its own, evaluate an MS license, reject it, and declare, "WE HAVE REJECTED THE MICROSOFT LICENSE", without giving MS any chance to alter the license to address the problems that OSI might have with it.
OSI has featured anti-MS rhetoric on its site. If they had decided to evaluate an MS license without MS submitting it, and publicly rejected the license, then it would have been seen as no more than an anti-MS hit-job. That they didn't do that actually strengthens their credibility, not weaken it.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
Because OSI complied to microsoft's demand and didn't evaluate the license, we won't know their stance about it.
/. signaled).
/.ers think that it's best to stick to known licenses that are widely used, documented and proven (including tested in court), and most of the time the debate is only about the duality BSD vs. GPL (Should we allow the code to be forked into a proprietary branch or not), and that's maybe what most home-brewed projects do.
On the other hand the FSF has shown what they're thinking about it.
Although both institutions (read: ESR and RMS) are known to have divergent point of view, this hints about how much this license can be free, and what one should think before starting his own project using this kind of licensing (something for which knowing OSI, FSF and DFSG's stance can be genuinly useful, as some other
I know that most
But there are a lot of place (I've whitnessed some), particulary those big places that are new to the open-source concept, that don't automatically trust GPL and consider it proven (they've usually never heard of Groklaw, or the numerous cases of GPL-violation that were successfuly resolved). They don't start with a small subset of preferences (BSD/GPL), but do extensive - but, alas, sometime un-educated - researchs about everything they can encounter, they often start considering obscure licenses that the average OSS user has never heard of, often on the account of some higher hierarchy member or some beancounter that are affraid to 'lose control', and may end up using a solution that will turn up to be not as useful as expected.
It is in such case that organisations like OSI can come handy to help choose and discern among the huge diversity of licensing scheme.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]