Microsoft's Open Source Licenses

[Donovan Hawkins]

Matthew Flaschen wrote: 

> I urge you not to approach
the OSD like this. Shared source
> licenses can't
meaningfully be considered almost
> OSD-compliant. They fail
/core/ parts of the definition. 

While I agree, I
didn't get the impression that they will market Shared Source as
"almost OSD compliant" or "83% OSD compliant". I
think he was just trying to point out that Shared Source has *some*
relationship to open source to help justify the relatively close
connection they have at Microsoft. As long as they don't muddy people's
understanding of the two different terms, there should be no problem.

If the close connection being made by Microsoft leaves some degree
of confusion as to why the OSD-compliant Microsoft licenses are
better than the non-compliant ones, it is entirely justified because I
don't really see a tremendous difference myself. Both sets of licenses do
a terrific job of keeping us from using the code but allowing companies to
use it in their closed-source products. They *all* fail core parts of
what I consider to be open source.

Donovan Hawkins