* October is Microsoft license season
I just can’t seem to get away from licensing issues in this newsletter. Evidently, October really is “license season” in Redmond. Microsoft last week released a revised set of licenses that didn’t get as much attention in the press as the virtualization licensing issue we talked about last week. This time, it was open-source licenses that Gates & Co. were revising under the Shared Source Initiative (SSI) project.
The big surprise, the thing that should have made the front page of at least the business section of the major newspapers was that a number of opponents of proprietary software had nice things to say about the move. Even Larry Lessig, founder of the Center for Internet and Society (with whom I almost never agree, see “Death of the Internet“), said it was a good move because it reduced the number of licenses used by the open-source community. Lessig believes the huge number of different open-source licenses is the single-most important problem in the world of free and open-source software, because many are incompatible, leading to situations in which it’s impossible to use the software.
The new licenses were announced by Microsoft’s voice of open source, Jason Matusow (think of him as the “anti-Ballmer”; see “Getting inside Microsoft” for more about Matusow) at the recent European Open Source Conference in Amsterdam. There are still three versions of the license, but according to Matusow they’ve been simplified and made easier to understand. His aim is to obviate the need of a highly priced lawyer while making it easier for a developer to know what is and isn’t allowed under each license, which should make it easier for Microsoft developers to share code.
The first of the three templates is the Permissive License – Ms-PL. The only restrictions it places on what you do with the code are that you mustn’t use the Microsoft trademark, and that the code must carry proper attribution.
Second is the Community License, Ms-CL, a reciprocal license that is similar to the Mozilla public licensing model – if you modify and distribute the code, you must give that file back to the community.
The final template is the Reference License, Ms-RL, essentially a “read-only” license to examine source code. This is especially popular with government entities.
You can find more information on the three new licenses on the Microsoft Shared Source Initiative Web site. Head to “Shared Source Licensing Programs” and find links to the dozens of different programs Microsoft offers based on these licenses.
In conjunction with the three new license types, Microsoft also announced that eight new Starter Kits for Visual Studio 2005 and the next version of the Windows CE Bluetooth Wrapper will be offered under the new Ms-PL. This license will enable software developers to have access to the Starter Kits and the Windows CE/Bluetooth code, modify them, and build a business or community around them without paying royalties to Microsoft.
Maybe the leopard can change its spots!
