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Microsoft Open Sources ASP.NET MVC
Jimmy Zimms writes "Microsoft's ASP.NET MVC is an extension built on the core of ASP.NET that brings some of the popular practices and ease of development that were popularized by Ruby on Rails and Django to the .NET developers.
Scott Guthrie, the inventor of ASP.NET, just announced that
Microsoft is open sourcing the ASP.NET MVC stack under the MS-PL license. 'I'm excited today to announce that we are also releasing the ASP.NET MVC source code under the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL). MS-PL is an OSI-approved open source license. The MS-PL contains no platform restrictions and provides broad rights to modify and redistribute the source code.' Here's the text of the MS-PL.
The MS-PL is a Free Software license, according to the FSF. It's just not compatible with the GPL.
There are multiple "shared source" licenses, some Free, others not: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_source
AEIOU: open-source anonymous internet currency
If you read it you'll find out that it's basically the BSD license. Why jump to conclusions just because it's Microsoft?
Happy New Year, it's 1984!
April Fools was yesterday. You're a day late.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
I don't get it, the license says you can make derivative works, and redistribute those works. Seems pretty free to me.
I'm not trying to argue the point with you. I just don't get it. Its legal speak, which I'm always doubtful that I understand the implications. But, this seems like free software.
Where am I getting it wrong?
I really don't /want/ to like the MS-PL or anything Microsoft, but I read it, and re-read it, and I can't see anything wrong with it. In fact, at the risk of being modded to oblivion, I gotta' say it's a far cry easier to understand than the GPL license, seems straightforward, and truly "open." It seems roughly as open as the BSD license. It doesn't even require you to open your own code under the same license. What am I missing? Is this a late April Fools' joke?
That Microsoft Shared Source License is open source, but not free software.
This isn't the Shared Source License. It's the Microsoft Public License which is accepted as a free software license by both the OSI and the FSF. You seem to be ranting about something completely unrelated to this article.
Hardly open source
How so? It's accepted as a free software license not only by the OSI but by the FSF as well.
This is an improvement, but it's hardly a compatible license with most other licenses.
The GPL is incompatible with a ton of other free software licenses. Does that make it "hardly open source" as well?
This is an improvement, but it's hardly a compatible license with most other licenses.
Sorry, but this isn't true. That it isn't compatible with the GPL doesn't mean it's incompatible with most other licenses. It's perfectly compatible with the BSD/Apache2/X11/Zlib/etc permissive licenses. You're spreading nonsense.
I'm not generally a fan of Microsoft, but I am actually quite impressed with the ASP.NET MVC framework. I certainly wouldn't say "very few people want it".
-William Brendel
Microsoft, realizing that they are losing their developers to other software platforms, attempts to close the crack in the dam by shoveling sand into it. We go live to Lance Thruster on the scene.
...began their labors. Unfortunately, it seems that this effort may be too little too late...
...I do have an unconfirmed report that Microsoft chairman Steve Ballmer himself is on the way to the dam break with several truck-loads of chairs he will use in an attempt to help.
Yes, Jim, 5 years after the dam began to crack, someone at Microsoft realized that the whole construction could be swept downstream at any moment. That's when this repair crew...
panning shot of Microsoft Open Source Evangelists at work shovelling sand
shot of developers spilling out of the Microsoft dam and into the PHP, Perl, Python, Java and Ruby streams
For Action Eyewitness OnTheSpot First News, I'm Lance Thruster reporting from the Microsoft dam.
It's impossible to be compatible with the BSD license and not be compatible with the GPL, because BSD is compatible with the GPL.
Unless you have some strange backwards definition of compatible, under which you would say "the GPL is compatible with the BSD license" because you can take BSD code and relicense it as GPL. However I think most people consider that statement false, while "the BSD is compatible with the GPL" is the true statement.
The fact is that BSD is compatible with the MS-PL and BSD is compatible with GPL. The BSD is compatible with a *lot* of licenses, including closed-source with a NDA.
Thank god someone said it. Ya know, HALF of the posts on here so far are "I wont trust MS" or some other closed-mind bullshit from Linux fanbois who MUST have it compatible with the GPL otherwise they piss their pants.
If you take a step back and look at it, it is an amazing licence coming from Microsoft to use on something like this. The only issue the GPL has with it is its slight copyleft policies...go read the copyleft wiki to see if that's really a bad thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft
The patent claim section. If you ever bring a patent claim against a contributor to the MS-PL licensed project you lose all rights under the license...
So if you develop around one of these code bases you are giving MS a one-way patent non-aggression pact, they are giving you nothing of the sort in return.
I agree that Visual Studio is a very nice tool.
Luckily the code that you produce with Visual Studio will run on Mono (no recompilations necessary) including code that uses ASP.NET MVC. And with the new support for ASP.NET precompiled sites in Mono (available in Mono 2.4) you do not even need to copy the source code to your target server.
Click "Publish" in visual studio, enter the location for your shared directory, and you have a fully working ASP.NET MVC app running on Linux, without leaving Windows.
We are working on various integration points for Visual Studio that will give developers even more: debugging from Visual Studio remote applications deployed on Linux systems and producing packages ready-for-distribution on Linux.
The GPL is a solution for a problem that doesn't exist anymore. Big unix is dead. Open source is here and it has the momentum, but the GPL is dead weight.
What if GPL code suddenly turned to BSD code and Microsoft (or anyone else) could steal it? History has shown that private forks of open source software generally don't work.
The open source development model is superior to the closed source development model. When People (or companies) do need to fork open source software, they quickly find their branch out of date and inferior to the mainline. It's easier and more economical to work on the main branch than to keep a closed fork.
Where does that leave the GPL? Primary as a tool for coercing companies into buying the closed-source version of an open source project (ext, mysql, and qt, for example). (Nokia moved QT to LGPL because the GPL wasn't beneficial to them).
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I think that clause is fairly reasonable if I use that license for my code. If somebody is gonna bring a patent claim against my stuff, screw them, they loose the license to use my work.
How is this different than similar patent clauses in other licenses?
(3.B) If you bring a patent claim against any contributor over patents that you claim are infringed by the software, your patent license from such contributor to the software ends automatically.
You can bring patent claims, as long you're not claiming THIS software violates your patents. If you claim the software infringes YOUR patents, and aren't willing to allow that -- then you don't get a free pass on THEIR patents either. Ie: Share and Share alike. Also, your license for the software doesn't terminate -- just your license to the patents. Which brings us to:
(2.B) Patent Grant- Subject to the terms of this license, including the license conditions and limitations in section 3, each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license under its licensed patents...
So it's not a one-way non-agression pact. It's a two-way pact. As long as you don't sue them for patent infringement, you can (re)use all of their code without fear of them suing you for patent infringement... Of course, since THEY are the ones giving YOU the source code, this is really slanted heavily in your favor -- you can have a look before you use it, decide if they violate your patents, and THEN choose to use it OR sue them. They have no such recourse.
Anger is never without a reason, but seldom with a good one. -- Benjamin Franklin
Either I'm missing your point, or you are only telling a partial truth.
It is one-way compatible. Almost all open-source licenses are one-way compatible with GPL. BSD code goes in, nothing comes out. MS-PL code goes in, nothing comes out. GPL is the blackhole of open source licenses. Stuff goes in, nothing comes out. Why? The license prohibits it.
This is untrue.
First, they ARE providing something to you: a world-wide, non-exclusive, royalty-free patent license. They can't sue you over patents in their code base; they already gave you a license to them.
Second, if you bring a patent claim against a contributor over code covered by the MS-PL (not just any code they wrote, as you implied) then you don't lose all rights, you only lose the royalty-free patent license from that specific contributor.
Example: Microsoft releases some code (call it code-base A) under MS-PL. It contains patented algorithm X.
You take A and extend it. Your extension (code-base B) contains an improvement on X, which you have patented. Call this improved version Y.
If Microsoft sues you over Y (which is basically a better X) then they lose the right to use Y, meaning that if Y is upheld they would have to license it from you. Furthermore, even if they win the case and the patent on Y is invalidated, X can still be used free of charge; they can't revoke your license to use it.
This seems a fair way to handle software patents in open-source software; a sort of copyleft scheme applied to patent right rather than copyright.
Mind you, IANAL, but the terminology seems pretty clear.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
I thought the point of open source was to make and share useful things. Things like development libraries, controls, frameworks, protocol stacks, and plenty of other useful widgets. Or is the goal really to just get free shit and I'm missing the point?
You are funny. Did you read that page? Pretty much every damn license in existance is incompatible with the GPL. But the "fun" one is this:
Yeah, right. Reminds me of this gem buried in the old man pages for the GNU implementation of su :
Yeah, screw security! Who needs passwords! Down with sysadmins!!
I might as well quote the rest of it because it is so juice and nobody will bother to follow the link above:
PS: Just realized that the FreeBSD man-page thingy offers way more man pages than just for FreeBSD. Check it out!
Are you kidding me?
I bought my home NAS (a Thecus) specifically because it was using linux for firmware. Thanks to that fact, I have hacked my own custom firmware with all the tools and services I need. Thanks to that there is an entire community hacking the Thecus models. Compare that to any BSD based NAS, where you get a binary firmware, which means no tinkering.
I've always tried explaining it like this:
Author -> (developers)* -> End User
Proprietary -> BSD -> GPL
With a proprietary license all rights are reserved to the author. If the author chooses a BSD license, most rights are passed to the developers including the right to make it, for all intents and purposed, proprietary. If the author however chooses the GPL, he can be assured that the rights will get passed all the way to the end-user, no matter how many developers there are between the original author and the end-user.
And that is why I GPL all my code, look for products using GPL'd code, and why the GPL most certainly is a solution to a problem that exists today.
You can put BSD code into a GPL program, exactly as you state.
You cannot put MS-PL code into a BSD program. If you could, then you could put it into a GPL program, since you can put BSD code into a GPL program!
The two licenses are IDENTICAL. BSD is compatible with both of them. They are both incompatible with the BSD and with each other.
Pretending that somehow the original BSD code vaporizes and disappears when somebody uses it in a GPL program, but this magical effect does not happen with the MS-PL program is a nice piece of FUD, too.