For Approval: Microsoft Permissive License

[Alexander Terekhov]

On 9/16/07, Chris Travers <chris.travers at gmail.com> wrote:
> Since the board is still considering this license, I wanted to provide some
> information from my research that might help with this decision.
>
> One of the main issues people have on this list is the idea that other
> existing permissive licenses allow sublicensing.
>
> I am not a layer, but I believe that this is wrong as a matter of intent
> licenses such as the BSD-licenses and the that it is also wrong as a matter
> of law.  In fact, most permissive licenses do not allow for sublicensing and
> force the licnese to follow the original copyrightable elements (including
> but not limited to code).

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2185919,00.asp
(OSI Calls for Major Revisions to Microsoft Permissive License)

--------
The MS-PL is also particularly restrictive, and is "uniquely
incompatible" with the maximum number of other open-source licenses,
Tiemann said, noting that in its examination of license proliferation,
the OSI had encouraged experimentation with license terms to encourage
new ones to be written that were better than what currently existed.

"We certainly don't want to presume that we have already invented
everything there is to be invented. However, the specific innovation
of maximum incompatibility of the MS-PL is not what we were looking
for, so I think what we have is a submission that has two fairly major
strikes against it," Tiemann said.
--------

Question to OSI Board of Directors:

What is he (Mr. Tiemann) smoking and where can I get some?

regards,
alexander.

--
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