MESSAGE
| DATE | 2003-06-14 |
| FROM | Richard Stallman
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [hangout] Embrace and...
|
Looking at this article from March, I see it does not specifically
refer to Stanco's conference. I had the impression that this had
been announced by Microsoft at the conference, but the article
doesn't say so.
Was it so?
Can anyone send me the text o the article by Mary Jo Foley that
it refers to? Can anyone send me a copy of the license itself?
>From this description, it sounds like a free software license.
I hesitate to think that is true, but I should check it myself
and see.
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2003 11:07:39 -0500
From: Ruben I Safir
To: Dave Williams , hangout-at-nylxs.com,
fairuse-at-nylxs.com, rms-at-gnu.org
Cc: hangout-at-nylxs.com
Subject: Re: [hangout] Embrace and...
In-Reply-To: <1048089474.3296.33.camel-at-connie>; from jdave23-at-informationwave.net on Wed, Mar 19, 2003 at 10:57:55 -0500
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YOU SEE THIS IS WHAT GOD DAMN TONY STANCO IS BRINGING ON THE
COMMUNITY
WAHT 3 DAYS OF CONFERENCE AND THIS IS THE ONLY RESULT.
MS shared source twitches towards liberal licensing
By John Lettice
Posted: 19/03/2003 at 13:58 GMT
A new form of Microsoft's shared source licence agreement unearthed by Microsoft Watch suggests that The Beast is at the very least experimenting with forms of words that might work, as opposed to engaging purely in propaganda efforts. The strapline to Mary Jo Foley's report says that the licence "seems to be inching closer - at least in spirit - to the GNU GPL" - this is clearly not true, but we nevertheless think we detect some element of constructiveness.
Microsoft's attitude to open source is schizoid. On the one hand the company's hierarchy categorises it as some kind of communistic peril that will eat all your IP if you touch it, while on the other Microsoft is very jealous, and really wants to figure out how it can similarly benefit from scads of happy developers making Microsoft software better for fun, because it's a mission. There are obviously fatal contradictions in Microsoft trying to set such processes in motion while continuing to keep all the money for itself, but one of the reasons Microsoft got where it is today is that it looked after developers, so aspects of the shared source initiatives represent a serious attempt to learn from and to reinvent successful models from elsewhere.
OK, it's a serious attempt to do this for ultimately devilish ends, but it's not wholly a marketing gag.
The current serious attempt appears in the ASP .Net Starter Kit License, a text of which you'll find here. It's short, and the salient features are that you can modify the software, distribute in source code form and create derivative works without having to check with Microsoft or pay royalties. You do have to tell the recipients you've made changes and when those changes were made, and you have to distribute under the new Microsoft licence, but that's pretty much it. It moves away from the 'look, don't touch' approach that's previously characterised shared source, and gives the impression that developers using this licence model will be doing so to develop software of value, rather than operating largely as unpaid bug-hunters for Redmond.
On its own it's clearly not enough, because one probably experimental wording for one thing certainly doesn't signal a revolution in Microsoft's approach to licensing. But if we sight a few more swallows, then it may take on significance.
Microsoft's terror of open source however remains all too obvious. The licence stresses:
"That you are not allowed to combine or distribute the Software with other software that is licensed under terms that seek to require that the Software (or any intellectual property in it) be provided in source code form, licensed to others to allow the creation or distribution of derivative works, or distributed without charge."
That is, Microsoft's lawyers still insist that you'll catch something nasty if you let open source touch your stuff. But nevertheless there are signs of movement here; Microsoft clearly will never adopt the GPL, but it might - over a long period, and at the expense of some considerable pain - eventually end up devising and employing something more BSD-ish. Could save itself a hell of a lot of time if it just stopped bitching about the open source peril and focussed positively on new models now, we reckon... ®
On 2003.03.19 10:57 Dave Williams wrote:
>
> This is a good one:
>
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/29823.html
>
> - Dave
>
> ____________________________
> NYLXS: New Yorker Free Software Users Scene
> Fair Use -
> because it's either fair use or useless....
> NYLXS is a trademark of NYLXS, Inc
>
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