For Approval: Microsoft Permissive License

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Philippe Verdy (verdy_p at wanadoo.fr):

[...]

> I am also not speaking much here about other legal rights and obligations:
> these are *written* clauses, they are public and exist within laws, outside
> of the licenses or contracts, they apply automatically on top of any licence
> or contract, and in priority to any written clause that is part of the
> license or contract, but their terms can change at any time and be completed
> or removed, without affecting the applicability of the existing terms of the
> licence or contrac; such legal exclusions may sometime have a retroactive
> effect (within some extents explicated by laws), and this also concerns the
> legal clauses about "public domain" or "fair use" or "right of citation",
> that are not part of the terms of any contract or licence, and that only
> exist because of national laws (and whose applicability is not universal as
> they concern legally delimited classes of users).

I _hope_ you're still talking about alleged trademark threats from a
company name being in a licence's name.  If so, once again, I call this
issue of yours simply bogus in the current matter under discussion:  No
reasonable objection has been cited to an open source licence having the
word "Microsoft" in its title, and no plausible reason has been cited as
to why anyone and everyone cannot lawfully use that licence for
third-party works, in your country or any other.

In passing, I'll also mention that nobody has ever felt there was a
threat from IBM over IBM Public License, Mozilla Corporation over
Mozilla Public License, Apple Computer over APSL, Intel over Intel
Public Source, Lucent over the Lucent Public License, etc.  I frankly
don't think it's because nobody realised those names are trademarked.