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OSI Asks Microsoft to Change the MS-PL
Xenographic writes "The OSI has identified two significant flaws in the Microsoft Permissive License, and is unlikely to approve it as an OSI license in its current state. Specifically, the OSI is worried about the way the MS-PL is incompatible with so many other OSI-approved licenses and how misleading that makes the term 'permissive' in the license's name. Now the ball is in Microsoft's court and they can choose to amend or withdraw it from consideration. From the article: 'The MPL is also particularly restrictive, and is uniquely incompatible with the maximum number of other open-source licenses, [president of OSI Michael Tiemann] said, noting that in its examination of license proliferation, the OSI had encouraged experimentation with license terms to encourage new ones to be written that were better than what currently existed.'"
Nobody gives a shit!
This is the license in question: MS-PL. The OSI complaints are without basis. OSI wants them to change their name and to make their license compatible with other open source licenses. The first complaint is a joke. The second is an even bigger joke. Open source licenses need to be compatible with other licenses to get approved now? The rule is obviously of recent manufacture.
I hope it eventually gets approved. It will be fun to watch all the people who are in to OSS just to hate Microsoft. OSS fanatics equate Microsoft to Satan himself no matter what the context. Heh that popping sound you'd here would be all the zealot head's exploding.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
It's not only GPL2, but GPL3 too. For those of you who don't understand why GPL2 and GPL3 are incompatible with any other open source licenses (BSDL, Apache License, Mozilla PL, etc.) and why the GPL is called a 'viral' license:
Both the GPL 2 and 3 require that all portions of a GPL-ed program must be distributed under the GPL. Hence, if I want to incorporate code that is under the BSDL, (Apache License, or Mozilla, or any other FOSS license), and distribute my code under the GPL and let others do the same with my code, I can't do that (unless I own copyright in the BSDL-ed code, which I'd need to have the right change the license terms). That's why GPL is called a viral license and that's why it's fundamentally incompatible with all open source licenses (except perhaps the LGPL).
Relevant proofs follow.
Quote from GPL3:
c) You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7 additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how they are packaged.
Quote from GPL2:
You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in
whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any
part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third
parties under the terms of this License.
[...] when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based
on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of
this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the
entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.
PS - Before you try it, taking a BSDL-ed code and releasing it under a more restrictive license (for example, under the GPL) is called relicensing, which the BSDL doesn't allow it (on the contrary). Therefore, you need the consent of the copyright owner of the BSDL-ed code to release it under the GPL.