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."

Comments

Re:easy answer

[CastrTroy]

Same way Sony can tell people that even copying a CD for use on a personal MP3 player is pirating, while at the same time selling VAIO computers that rip CDs, and portable music players that come with software that helps you rip CDs, as well as selling CD burners, and blank disks to copy CDs onto. They are such a big company, that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. What's good for one department isn't always good for another department, and sometimes the needs of different departments within the same organization clash.

Re:easy answer

[GPL Apostate]

The GNU project has tended to embrace and extend things. Not to the point of extinguishing them (except for classic UNIX, to a large degree.) But many people write shell scripts that traditionally run under /bin/sh but include bash extensions that make it impossible to run them under regular /bin/sh on other systems. The GCC contains extensions that don't deprecate and aren't flagged when the -pedantic switch is set. As a consequence C code is written that won't compile on other than GCC, and the developers aren't even made aware of this. The codebase slowly becomes GCC compilable only. All of this can be researched by anybody interested enough to look into it. The GNU project is an extend/embrace/extinguish operation, much like Microsoft.