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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.
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.
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....
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.
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
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.
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 ]
"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.
Let's see:
With each of those steps having a hundred fracking steps involved to accomplish them, and about 40 different places to branch based on what goes wrong.
Linux has this amazing ability to start me off simply wanting to accomplish something simple (playing a song), and ending up with me updating the kernel or something so I can update gcc so I can compile some library that needs a newer gcc that is required by some other library that is required by the music playing app. (not a real nor necessarily realistic example, just trying to make a point) Hell, by the time I give up, I've often forgotten what my original goal was.
ND
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