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OSI Approves Microsoft Ms-PL and Ms-RL
Russ Nelson writes "In a board meeting held October 10th and announced today, the Open Source Initiative approved two of Microsoft's software licenses: the Microsoft Reciprocal License and the Microsoft Public License. These licenses are refreshingly short and clean, compared to, say, the GPLv3 and the Sun CDDL. They share a patent peace clause, a no-trademark-license clause, and they differ only in the essential clause of reciprocation. Of course, Microsoft is not widely trusted in the Open Source world, and their motives have been called into question during the approval discussions. How can they be attacking Open Source projects on one hand, and seeking not only to use open source methods, but even to use the OSI Approved Open Source trademark? Nobody knows for sure except Microsoft. But if you are confident that Open Source is the best way to develop software (as we at the Open Source Initiative are), then you can see why Microsoft would both attack Open Source and seek to use it. It is both their enemy and their salvation."
The Ms-PL looks basically like the same terms as the BSD/MIT license with a patent peace clause, and the Ms-RL looks like the same thing with a Mozilla PL-like reciprocal clause. Neither one looks like the GPL. That's an unalloyed good thing.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
You can use GPLd (any version) software to build anything you like. The license doesn't come into play until you distribute the software.
Why do people find this so hard to understand? Its a simple concept.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
For those who don't recognize the reference, here's a Wikipedia article on Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish.
My truck is like a series of tubes.
It's interesting the attribution clause included on these licenses. We have many discussions about how manage attribution on open source projects. CPAL (https://www.socialtext.net/open/index.cgi?cpal) license gave us some points to consider when talking about attribution. This license allows you to put a limited attribution on the software "copyright notice, short phrase (10 words), graphic image and URL." GPL 3 has it's own clause on attribution resources (see clause 7) The way Ms-RL Ms-PL describes how attribution will be managed has another aproach from the previous licenses: They require you to respect any attribution notices that the original work has. So here we have an OSI approved license which can be used to preserve all your attribution notices...
Bull. Google runs a customized version of Linux and only uses it internally, they aren't required to give the source to people who visit their website. Plenty of people/companies go to the expense of building internal-only software.
Not a sentence!
1. Definitions.
"License" shall mean the terms and conditions for use, reproduction, and distribution as defined by Sections 1 through 9 of this document. Not only is this license approved by the OSI as open source, it is also considered to be a Free Software License by the FSF and is even compatible with GPLv3.
Open Source is not always FLOSS. It does not have to be free as in freedom. It doesn't have to be free as in beer either, unless of course you pirate.
In and of itself, all Open Source means is that the distributor does not hide the source from the outside world. No part of that says that you are legally allowed to either redistribute, modify or use the software, or do pretty much anything with the source other than just look at it. No privileges whatsoever given by copyright law are lost if you decide to show your source to the world (except a helluva tougher time to enforce those laws now that anyone can illegally take your code and use it in their own (closed-source) program without you knowing about it, but that's a different story).
A lot of security-related products make their source open for review so you know it doesn't have backdoors and whatnot, but that doesn't mean they let you to legally use or redistribute it without paying whatever fee they want.
FLOSS is a subset of OSS, but not vise versa. I'm also not saying one is better or worse than the other, just getting the facts straight.
Probably the exception that proves the rule, but I believe you can compile Bacula under MSVisualC, and MinGW (compile for Windows under Windows or Linux)
Also, all the Xen 'public' headers I have used so far under Windows compile under the WDK provided compiler with about two extra #defines required.
Interestingly the OSI's Open Source Definition is derived from an attempt to define the FSF's 4 freedoms.
The lineage goes from the FSF to Debian (and the Debian Free Software Guidelines) to the OSI's Open Source Definition (which were mostly copied from the DFSG).
If you read the MS-Reciprical License and the MS-PL, you will see that they don't provide any restrictions on use, so this distinction doesn't really matter anyway.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
If they sold the modified software, or gave it to a different company, then they would be breaking the GPL, and would get a call from the FSF just like anybody else. That's actually -worse-. At least if you have a copy of Word or Windows, you can, when the DMCA lawyers aren't looking, go and tinker with both and sorta figure out how things work. You can control the installation of the software, and, above all, you can at least get some kind of clue to see if they violated the GPL. So in other words, you can only find out if they are breaking the GPL by breaking a different license first. How is that worse than a company using GPL software as intended. The software is never at any point closed. Even if you found something, it would be inadmissible. You don't get any of that when someone uses a GPL behind the shield of a web service, or behind the shield of a corporate veil. In the grand scheme of things, if you are using a piece of software to enable a business - even in the back office, you are sorta distributing it... because you are copying the benefits that it provides. And, you give the users of that software no rights at all. No. You are using the software. It is specifically licensed so that you can do anything you want to do with it, so long as you do not distribute the software without making the source available. Using it within a company is the same concept of one person using the software. Honestly, I got nuked down to zero, but the intent of OSS is that software is a globally collaborate thing. Hiding behind web services and corporate barriers is not open and not collaborative, and therefor, I stand by my statement, even if not the letter, ALL OF YOU who are using this software at work without making the derived application publicly available are violating the spirit of the GPL. Perhaps you get nuked because the points you are making are wrong. Read the GPL again. You can use, inspect and modify the code to your heart's content. But you must allow access to the source IF you distribute. Distribution is something that occurs OUTSIDE the influence of a company or an individual user.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
IronPython, IronRuby, .NET's Dynamic Runtime Library (DLR) (used by .NET and Silverlight) are among the code that Microsoft has already released under Ms-PL.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
GCC and Bash are opensource, you can get them to run on ANYTHING you bloody well want too. So if you want to use code that only compiles under gcc then all you need to do is get gcc to work on your system. Have you checked how many systems gcc works on? Go ahead, I will wait. Wow, long list eh?
Now compare this with closed source, lets say C#, how many systems does MS compiler run on? Oh, only windows. Wow that was quick.
Same with their IE, it ain't the problem that IE does things differently, it is that nobody really knows and can't copy that behaviour. THe problem ain't that IE does things differently as such, it is that they don't publish how to do it, so everybody else is left with browsers that run their "enhancements" slightly differently and end up with messed up pages.
All your post has done is to show WHY opensource is so essential. Frankly if this is the best attack you can muster against GNU, then we can sit back and relax, we won.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Kerberos
Java
HTML
RSS
MAPI
Etc, etc...
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Most of us would at least check SourceForge before making silly accusations.
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=200665
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Back when GCC was managed by RMS, he liked adding "convenient" extensions to the language. One of the reasons was to "tie" the programs to GCC as you describe.
:-)
The current maintainers have quite a different view on them, they only add extensions for things that can't be expressed in the language (mostly stuff close to hardware, or sometimes optimization hints), and they give them __unwieldy_names__. And they are slowly removing the convenience features.
If you don't get a warning from an extension (rather than a "quality of implementation" issue) with -ansi -pedantic it is a bug.
There probably are such bugs (GCC is big and complex, and there are stuff in the language that can't really be tested) but I guess you can't actually mention any, since you are most likely just a troll making stuff up as you go. So I challenge you to mention one such issue that can not be found in the bug database to prove you are not a troll. And if you can mention two such issues, I'm willing to believe that you are not a kook either. In either case, please submit a bug report when done