Microsoft open-source license finds (some) love A home-cooked Microsoft license has carved out a small but growing following among the open-source community in less than two years. Microsoft's Public License (MS-PL) is used by 1.03 per cent of open-source projects less than two-years after it was officially recognized by the Open-Source Initiative and is poised to overtake …
Okay, I may be missing something here, but:
Para. 2: "Microsoft's Public License (MS-PL) is used by 1.3 per cent of open-source projects"
Para. 3: "MS-PL is tenth in a list of licenses used by the community with [Mozilla Public License] coming ninth and used by 1.25 per cent of projects"
Like I say, I'm probably missing something, but surely 1.3 is not less than 1.25?
Quick one, it's perfectly possible (I do it in most of my projects) to state that the code is released under the GPL, and not mention a version. This is generally taken to mean the latest version of the GPL. So are these counted as GNU GPL V3?
Not that it makes much difference, just wondering
open source meant the source would compile and run on just about any platform, with necessary platform specific tailoring in the makefile).
Unless I missed something, MS PL gives a licence to use code that will only run on a .net platform. It seems more a like a free(ish) licence to use proprietary code, and the article an attempt to big up MS as an open source player when it clearly isn't.
Mine's the one with V. Meldrew on the label
"..behind the firewall...there is no legal claim on the source code of the application doing your computation."
And thus, is the System in Flux and Being Reconfigured to AI Beta Standards and Better Virtual Standards.
There's a lot going on ... Out There ...... in the Free Voids of CyberSpace. And obviously, a hell of a lot more that you have ever Imagined.
Stay Tuned for RapIDE dDevelopments ..... for in Intellectual Space Travel is Research Potential Exponential ...... and an Exponential of Time and Space...... which would takes Us into QuITe Cosmic Realms of Thoughtful Creation. .... which is bound to be of business interest to an Embrace Extend Extinguish Entity.
“it's perfectly possible (I do it in most of my projects) to state that the code is released under the GPL, and not mention a version. This is generally taken to mean the latest version of the GPL.”
Wrong. It's any version of the GPL, which is the same as saying "version 1 or later". See §7 of v1, §9 of v2 or §14 of v3, all of which contain the following text: "If the Program does not specify a version number of the GNU General Public License, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software Foundation."
“So are these counted as GNU GPL V3?”
Yes, unless you're counting minimum version no., in which case v1.
Anyway, how much of that 50.5% is GPL v2 and how much is GPL v2 or later? Ditto for v3 (ignoring those for which v2 is also valid).
People kept saying we have too many licenses and instead they give them out like Pez candy.
Whether something is an open source license is meaningless to most free software deveopers except in one way: is it compatible with the GPL family of licenses?
The MS-PL was made to be incompatible with the GPL (and others like Affero, LGPL,etc) and this was not by accident but by design.
You *can't* combine it into a GPL project which seems designed gratuitously to break GPL
compatibility.
This license is:
(a) like the BSD license in that you can take a derived work proprietary
(b) like the BSD license in that you can redistribute it in open source form under the same
license
(c) *unlike* the BSD license in that you cannot incorporate it into an open source project
with a more restrictive license.
When you have more lawyers than hell will ever need, you end up
producing a GPL-incompatible clone of the GPLv2, and a GPL-incompatible clone of the BSD license.
That is impressive legal judo that Im sure the Groklaw crowd would appreciate more than most developers.
Will the license is called open source, its almost transparently designed to impede code
sharing with other free/open source projects... which is one of the great
strengths of the free software movement.
hey, it does its job which is to give lip service to the 'Redmond has changed' PR that they are milking out of this while the heads of the company never once hint that this fantasy is true.
How often have you taken the words of low level Apple employees to signal a dramatic change of direction for the company?
Yet, we are being fed this line about Microsoft when NONE of the heads of the company have ever showed ANY signs of treating the 'cancer' differently.
Of course, if they can get something out of developers for free but without having to share this work with others, then they are all for it.
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