Microsoft's shared source licenses

So what do you guys think of the new Microsoft shared source
licences?

The FSF of Europe said that 2 licenses (MS-PL and MS-CL) are
both
free/open source compatible licenses.

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/defa
ult.mspx



Its funny that they list those 5 because most of the big
code is
released under another license similar to the one below I
talk about.

I'm one of the developers on the Mono project. We are
scared of
Microsoft shared source licenses in general. We started
reimplementing
the .NET framework in Mono against the publicly filed
standards
Microsoft released to ECMA years before Microsoft's
released the shared
source version of .NET Framwork (codename Rotor).
 

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=8C0
9FD61-3F26-4555-AE17-3121B4F51D4D&displaylang=en
http://msdn.microsoft.com/MSDN-FILES/027/
002/097/ShSourceCLILicense.htm

When it came out, we were absolutely scared after looking at
the license
to even open the code, even though one of the listed things
you can do
with it on the page says: "People developing their own
CLI
implementations will find the Shared Source CLI an
indispensable guide
and adjunct to the ECMA standards."

The lawyers at Novell warned us about it too. In fact even
though it
says that, we do not allow contributions from people that
admitting have
even downloaded or looked at that code for fear of that
nasty license.  

That license is nothing like the one they list on their
homepage. Then
look at IronPython's license: 
http://www.gotdotnet.com
/workspaces/License.aspx?id=ad7acff7-ab1e-4bcb-99c0-57ac5a3a
9742

Very similar. I see this one most in a lot of Microsoft
applications. A
few terms in there scare me. 

What do you guys think?


Currently we release our class libraries are released under
a
MIT/X11/ZLib/BSD(modified) like license (whatever you want
to call it
today). Our runtime is LGPL, and our C# compiler is GPLv2. 

Zac

Zac Bowling scripsit:

> So what do you guys think of the new Microsoft shared
source licences?
> 
> The FSF of Europe said that 2 licenses (MS-PL and
MS-CL) are both
> free/open source compatible licenses.

Because Microsoft hasn't submitted these licenses for OSI
approval,
neither this list nor the OSI has taken a position on them. 
Personally,
I agree with FSF Europe.

[Rotor license:]
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/MSDN-FILES/027/
002/097/ShSourceCLILicense.htm

This license is not Open Source, but I think Microsoft would
have a
very difficult time using it as a poison pill.  Still, it
can't hurt
to be safe.

> look at IronPython's license: 
> http://www.gotdotnet.com
/workspaces/License.aspx?id=ad7acff7-ab1e-4bcb-99c0-57ac5a3a
9742

This license looks Open Source to me (IANAL, this is not
legal advice,
I don't speak for the OSI).

> Very similar. I see this one most in a lot of Microsoft
applications. A
> few terms in there scare me. 

Which ones?

-- 
Time alone is real                      John Cowan
<cowanccil.org>
  the rest imaginary
like a quaternion       --phma          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan