Microsoft's Open Source Licenses

[Jon Rosenberg (PBM)]

Hi All - It seems that one bullet point in my mail has caused some confusion, so I will attempt to clarify:

The statement in question perhaps should have read, "The OSI approved licenses will be distinguished from X," where X is any non-OSI approved license. I gave a couple of illustrative example values of X at the end of this sentence which apparently caused some concern. My intent here was to communicate that all non-OSI approved licenses will be distinguished from the OSI approved licenses. Not most of them, not just the ones that bear no similarities to the OSI approved licenses, but all of them. I hope that this clarifies the intent of the statement and I look forward to further feedback on our web site plans.

Thanks you as always for the helpful feedback.

Jon

-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Travers [mailto:chris.travers at gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, November 02, 2007 9:54 AM
To: License Discuss
Subject: Re: Microsoft's Open Source Licenses

On 11/2/07, Cinly Ooi <cinly.ooi at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I do not like the idea of "yes or no" argument. Whether Microsoft can claim
> that its "other" licenses share some characteristics of OSD approved license
> is up to OSD to decide. Not me.

I know I am saying the same thing as *everybody* else, but this is
still worth saying for the sake of clarifying the discussion.

If one says that a tangerine is similar to an orange, is this no
different from calling Microsoft's "limited" licenses similar to the
open source ones?  (not open source because they limit development to
Windows.)

However, I don't think that factual, descriptive statements are for
OSD to regulate either.  At the same time, I don't think anyone wants
to see misleading marketing of Microsoft shared source licenses.  So I
think that the proper response is to provide honest feedback to
Microsoft as many people here are doing, but ultiimately give the
company a chance to market their shared source program responsibly.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers