Microsoft's Open Source Licenses

[Simon Phipps]

On Nov 2, 2007, at 16:54, Chris Travers wrote:

> 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.)

Yes, it's different. If "Open Source" were a quality of which  
fractional achievement were significant your analogy would be OK.  
Since in this case "Open Source" is a service mark indicating  
approval of a license as conformant with the OSD, it is not  
appropriate for it to be associated with anything that has not been  
so approved. Typically, trade mark and service mark licensing schemes  
make this clear so that the value of the mark can't be eroded by  
"embrace and extend" schemes where partial similarity is used to  
mislead the casual observer into associating the mark with an  
ineligible subject.

S.

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