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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."
SCO will sue them? :)
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.)
I wish there was more in thye explaination of microsoft saying drop it.
It would be interesting if they ever intended shared source to be anything other then an opensource riddin publicity show.
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.
Uh oh... IEEE Computer Society links to OSI's site (first sentence, "Open Source"), which links to ESR's site which links to the Halloween docs.
Honestly, what was the guy thinking?
The heavens do not fall for such a trifle.
Upon audit, the license was found to contain non-final wordings.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
I'm tired of reading yet another story about microsoft and OSS cozying up. Though in this case it's a sad joke, the rest of the time it's a coordinated attack on OSS. (mozilla devs, black hat testing, etc)
If it doesn't work they'll buy the best developers and hide them away. If that doesn't work, they'll drop more litigation bombs.
It's all about maintaining the monopoly people. There's no maybe, that's it.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
The sheer size and scope of the project? Never mind exposing their own and licensed IP??
Apparently, the MS word spell-checker doesn't recognise 'OSI'.
Free Software advocates may seem out of touch, but it's NOW when times are good that you have to stay on the path. The whole "free software" movement rides the thin line between academic/hobby project and real, live commercial copyright. If they make the license too loose, they set bad precedent. If they don't actively define their position when they see a "violation" then they may miss something and again,set bad precedent. If they don't keep an active copyright push, then they risk a judge throwing all GPL code into "pubic domain". Especially because they aren't a "real" company, but a "club" it makes it easier for others to say FSF meant the code to be "public" and they let it lose.
Also, when times are good, they have to be careful of imposter licenses. Ones that look "free" enough, but have gottchas that let an orginating company swoop in, or a downstream company lock-up the code later on. Things like Sun's OpenOffice.org fall in that catagory. Again, it's important to not let the "free software" brand if you will be diluted so that it doesn't become a free for all.
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.
In fact, they even had a campaign with supermodels such as Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell posing naked, with their heads shaved, on billboards, with the slogan "I'd Rather Go Bald than Split Hares" emblazoned across their chests.
Please (Physical)
Do (Data link)
Not (Network)
Throw (Transport)
Stale (Session)
Pizza (Presentation)
Away (Application)
I do not know why this is still in my brain, I learned it 5+ years ago and have essentially never used it. It's like what Dave Barry said: "[W]hen I was in college, I had to memorize -- don't ask me why -- the names of three metaphysical poets other than John Donne. I have managed to forget one of them, but I still remember that the other two were named Vaughan and Crashaw. Sometimes, when I'm trying to remember something important like whether my wife told me to get tuna packed in oil or tuna packed in water, Vaughan and Crashaw just pop up in my mind, right there in the supermarket. It's a terrible waste of brain cells."
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
I bet it wasn't the FSF, since they're not interested in "open source".
They may define "Open Source" (which appears to be a trademark), but not necessarily open source - I'll leave that to a good dictionary. Also, it seems possible that some people might consider the members of OSI to be zelots themselves as much as say, Steve Ballmer would be for his respective cause.
Wikileaks, no DNS
My understanding is that Microsoft is interested in supporting their community of users with an open source license from a source they trust (which would be Microsoft, of course). They don't perceive much overlap between their community of open source users and the traditional unix-centric open source users. Thus, they don't (currently) see much value to them in seeking OSI approval.
Seems only reasonable to me. The proper course of action seems to be practicing patience.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
More to the point, I think Microsoft can already (correctly) guess what the OSI would say about their license in comparison to others. Personally, I think it says a lot about your software license if you are afraid of it being compared to others.
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 ]
Okay, I agree with you there.
My point is that the criteria are partly subjective on the part of the licencor, not that there's anything sneeky going on.
Wikileaks, no DNS
All people some time need data processing.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I showed that EIA/RETMA was not an international standards body. EIA provides standards to ANSI, which as a member of ISO is an international standards body. Not all EIA standards become international standards. RETMA, the predecessor of the EIA, was not an international standards body, the standards that it set were not widely adopted outside of North America and parts of Asia.
"Open Source" is not a trademark, nor is "open source", for various technical reasons. "OSI Approved" *is* a trademark, and you can slap it on your software if you are 1) making source code available and 2) using a license on OSI's list.
A license doesn't have to be OSI-approved in order to be an open-source license. An OSI-approved license is one that is an open-source license in the judgment of various people, not just the OSI board members.
On what grounds? Just by asking politely, or have they a right to do this? Do they own the copyright on that licence? Seriously. If I write a sort of GPL, must the license also not be released under a sort of GPL?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Don Giovanni made the same stupid mistake of assuming that we would play favorites. Should rip you a new asshole, too? Sheesh, what is with you people? From where comes the idea that we are biased towards one party or another? Is there any evidence of this? The Halloween Documents? Those were Microsoft behaving badly, and us pointing that out. So now that Microsoft is starting to release open source software (aka behaving nicely) somebody thinks we would treat them poorly? I'm like "What the fuck? Surely there's a LIMITED amount of stupidity in the world, why is there so much of it concentrated around this issue??"
I'm aghast. Really, I am. I hope you're blushing. Even if you have no intellectual prowess, at least you can feel badly about making such a world-class error.
Ahhhh, for the good old days of alt.flame.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
The official recommendation of PETA, however, is definitely to split hares.
If you are the John Cowan then I hope someone mods you up as informative.
With that said I would only change my post to read "the best reason for submitting" instead of "undoubtedly the reason for submitting".
Whether this license meets the letter of the definition is something best left to the lawyers but this EULA (or any EULA) is definately a violation of the spirit of open source.
I also still maintain that OSI evaluation of a license should not be dependant upon consent by the author. Either a license is OSI compliant or not and people have a right to know that.
> The Halloween Documents? Those were Microsoft behaving badly, and us pointing that out.
... but more than that, the interspersed commentary in those documents marked the beginning of a steep drop in my respect for ESR. He's damn near the Rob Enderle of Open Source these days.
Those were indeed unflattering of Microsoft
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Microsoft didn't say 'Drop it'. They said they need to consider it.
Not to defend them, but FUD is FUD, even if it's against the 'other' side of the Open Source fence.
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
You didn't read the article; nor did I until just now.
First, the reasons for OSI not evaluating licenses that aren't formally submitted by the license authors are detailed in the article.
Second, the MS license was NOT submitted so that it would officially be rejected by OSI. In fact, the opposite is the case. It was submitted because the submitter felt that the license is *likely* to achieve OSI compliance.
Third, OSI appears to feel the same way. Quoting from the article:
The article also says that MS hasn't closed the door on submitting the licenses themselves. It would behoove them to to so, as it would be good PR when these licenses are approved (which, after reading the article, is more likely than them being rejected).
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
For me it's old songs like the Beach Boys' "California Girls" popping up in my mind. Seems especially to happen while I'm standing over a six-foot putt.
Everything in this makes sense. Someone wants to see if the license fits the criteria, so they submit it. No malice. The OSI report that they require the owner/licence author to submit it - with good reason, no malice. They contact Microsoft, who, according to the article, say "We aren't going to report anything to the OSI while they still align themselves with the Halloween documents", and point out that they reflect the state of the company some years ago. If they are trying to change, which submission of an licence to OSI surely should be recognised as a step towards, then they deserve an (official) break from their past.
They're not asking for the documents to be erased from history, just a very anti-Microsoft link removed from the OSI President's web site.
Sorry, I mixed up the links : THIS is the link to the non-free software license.
Thank you for pointing out my error.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I subscribe to that reflector: this happened MONTHS ago and yet it's getting public notice NOW?