License Details Hint MS Undecided On Suing Users of Its Open Source Net Runtime

ciaran2014 writes With Microsoft proudly declaring its .NET runtime open source, a colleague and I decided to look at the licensing aspects. One part, the MIT licence, is straightforward, but there's also a patent promise. The first two-thirds of the first sentence seems to announce good news about Microsoft not suing people. Then the conditions begin. It seems Microsoft can't yet bring itself to release something as free software without retaining a patent threat to limit how those freedoms can be exercised. Overall, we found 4 Shifty Details About Microsoft's "Open Source" .NET.

Comments

Nothing new here

[Anonymous Coward]

So just like Mono, then?

Re:Nothing new here

[Sarten-X]

They just have to claim No True Scotsman first.

Break any rule in the Microsoft-written standards (possibly even to provide better compatibility with Microsoft's own runtime, which is not required to comply with the written documentation), and now you're not a ".NET Runtime"... just something real close. Since the MSDN part of the description itself is dynamic and hosted by an interested party, there's precisely nothing preventing Microsoft from "clarifying" features in the documentation, with the side effect of changing the legality of other implementations.

The promise not to sue would be a good thing, but from a legal perspective, the license is a landmine. Words like "all" are scary in such a license. Now, if it said something like "a substantial majority" or "a reasonable amount", that would give a judge the room to declare an implementation to be close enough, then I'd be far less paranoid about this.

Yes, Microsoft killed my Pappy. Why shouldn't I be worried when that smoking gun is still pointing at me? As the author of your linked article said:

Sure, we do stupid stuff sometimes, usually because someone in one org isn't talking to another org, or some marketing vendor overreaches, every big company makes these mistakes.

I'd say that a weak protection falls into that category. Some group successfully pushed to open the runtime, but the legal team in charge of the license language doesn't understand why the GPL and BSD licenses are appealing to open-source projects. It isn't because of the promises made by the authors; it's because in the event that a lawsuit does happen, the defendants have very clear ammunition in the license ready for use. This doesn't provide that reassurance.

Same question as I had more than a decade ago

[TWX]

Why do people want to take proprietary languages and libraries and use them on open source projects?

I remember some interest in .net and mono and other Microsoft-derived stuff in Linux a long time ago. Why is there this interest in commingling the Microsoft way with the POSIX way when there are so many POSIX tools already available? I don't understand this choice. It's literally giving ammunition to the party that at one point had a declared interest in trying to replace all UNIX and UNIX-like OSes with its own commercial platforms. Why make it easier for that to happen by developing with their technologies?

Re:Same question as I had more than a decade ago

[ckatko]

In other words, developers want something that works everywhere, and .NET is the best of the only, crappy, solutions we have available.

It's much harder (and hugely risky) to make a brand new, gigantic project for cross-platform software, than it is to re-implement someone's existing framework. If you don't have money to burn, nobody is going to do that. What if you commit 5 man-years of effort and then nobody uses it? People usually prefer incremental expansions to existing frameworks. Didn't we just have a thread on re-inventing the wheel?

Re:Same question as I had more than a decade ago

[TWX]

Clothing produced in Vietnam is a good, once it's sold the original producer has no say over what happens to it.

Software produced by a corporation is intellectual property. It is not usually sold, it is licensed. The original producer usually retains some say over what happens to it, far beyond the realm of simply protecting it from unlicensed duplication.

So worried about Microsoft

[MikeRT]

Despite the fact that every other big software company is doing the same or worse. If you take a whizbang feature from Java and use it in Python, you're more likely to be sued by Oracle than doing the equivalent getting you sued by Microsoft. Seriously people, the level of chickenshit that formed the foundation of the Oracle-Google lawsuit would make a chicken house unusable for 5 generations and you don't see the level of "ZOMG TEH JAVA IZ RADIOACTIVE" from the people criticizing Microsoft.

The Gates/Ballmer era is over. Get over it. The petty bullshit about Microsoft makes you sound like someone who is still fighting the PPC/x86 fight.

Re:Oh yes, we read the annotations

[jklovanc]

As always the un-annotated version is open to interpretation. Your interpretation just slants toward bad things happening.

Nothing in the OSD is clearly stated

Sorry but that annotation states clearly that section 10 is about the license and not code content.

we would have used 1, 6, and 7

Secion 1 is about bundling as in you can't distribute along with another package. Section 6 is about discrimination in fields of endeavor as in you can not use this code in a specific industry. Section 7 is about redistributed without the need for execution of an additional license. None of those sections have anything to do with modifying the code.

we decided two sections were sufficient to make the point that the OSD isn't supposed to approve of suing people who reuse your code.

And you were incorrect in that section 10 does not state what you represent it to state.

Those are the standards they claim to be living by, so those are the standards we judged their licensing on.

You are basing your standard on your interpretation of of the OSD instead of doing due diligence and digging further to understand what OSD really means by those few words. The fact you misinterpreted the statement is not Microsoft's issue. It is your issue. That is not what I would call journalistic entirety.

Section 3 is the only section that talks about distributing modified code. Had you stopped there we would not be having this conversation. Even then your case is weak. Microsoft is allowing the code to be modified and redistributed. Microsoft is just putting certain restrictions on it. Is there anywhere that OSD states restrictions are not allowed?