By Gavin Clarke in San Francisco for The Register
This article has been reproduced from The Register, with
permission.
The Free Software Foundation has said new licenses for
Microsoft's pseudo open source program, the Shared Source
Initiative, appears to satisfy the four requirements
defining Free Software. Professors Larry Lessig and Ronald Mann,
meanwhile, welcomed Microsoft's changes saying they reduce the
number of open source licenses in use by the community.
In fact, there are five more, as of today.
This early support is a sharp contrast to the criticism levelled
by the open source movement at Sun Microsystems when it launched
its Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), to cover
the release of Solaris and its middleware.
While any improvement to Microsoft's Kafka-esque source
licensing will be welcomed by developers and enterprises, this
latest set of options represents a continued, if somewhat
predictably limited, evolution in Shared Source.
Permissive Society
Microsoft has introduced
three top-level licenses, which dictate the terms and
conditions under which code for Microsoft technologies are released
through Shared Source. The three are Microsoft Permissive License
(Ms-PL), the Community License (Ms-CL) and the Reference License
(Ms-RL).
It's there that things start to get a bit more complicated.
Microsoft is also introducing two sub-licenses, Limited
Permissive License (Ms-LPL) and Limited Community License
(Ms-LCL) that's complication enough. However, Microsoft is
adding another layer, as the five licenses only apply to new code
released under Shared Source; it is unclear probably
unlikely that more than 80 Microsoft technologies already
available under Shared Source will be ported to the new
licenses.
Additionally, the open source-friendly noises made by Microsoft
appear to be just that noises. Ms-LPL and Ms-LCL restrict
the use of Shared Source code to Windows. Code released under these
sub-licenses will not, for example, find its way onto Linux.
Furthermore, the big-ticket items like Windows and Office
available under Shared Source for government are unlikely to be
re-released under the new licenses. A Microsoft spokeswoman told
The Register this would be a decision for the individual
technology groups.
Instead, Microsoft is aiming relatively low on what it releases.
The spokeswoman said Microsoft's Bluetooth wrapper for Windows CE
and eight starter kits for Visual Studio 2005 will be released
under Ms-PL. The latter, for example, to add the ability for
applications to keep track of new film releases on Amazon.com.
That's a continuation of existing policy. Microsoft released its
Windows Template Library, Windows Installer XML and FlexWiki to
SourceForge to SourceForge last year.
There is an upside. Ms-PL allows developers to view, modify and
redistribute source code for commercial and non-commercial without
paying Microsoft royalties. Ms-CL stipulates that where Ms-CL is
used in a particular file then the entire file must be
re-distributed in source code form with a "per-file reciprocal
term".
Hurdles
Microsoft is clearly taking something of a"copy left" approach
to Shared Source, an approach that is used widely in the real
open source community.
Microsoft is notoriously obsessed
with detail when it comes to licensing.
The shenanigans around Microsoft Communications Protocol Program
(MCPP) proved it was more than happy to release code while putting
up just enough bureaucratic hurdles to make obtaining that code by
developers too complicated and time-consuming for them to
bother.
These latest changes should be seen in this context and will
come as little surprise when you remember how Shared Source started
life: as a response to increased concerns among customers to the
security of its products in light of numerous worm attacks, and the
growing success of open source and Linux, particularly in the
government sector.
The five licenses represent another shift in Microsoft's journey
closer to the open source community and development methodologies.
While welcome, the changes give the community just enough of what
it wants while leaving Microsoft in the driving seat in terms of
what code it releases and the conditions it uses.
© The Register
2005
