Comment by josteink
9 years ago
> This is quite an improvement from the olden days when a certain Microsoft executive described the GPL as a cancer, and open source in general as a thing to avoid
Absolutely.
And don't take this the wrong way... I much appreciate the improvements. But there's still a very strong trend that Microsoft code contributions tend to be in MIT or similarly permissively licensed projects. They still tend to avoid the GPL where possible.
(Disclaimer: Have contributed code and patches. I don't personally don't mind permissive licenses)
The problem of these licenses is that they don't come with patents grants. Which given that this is Microsoft we are talking about, it's a big deal.
Of course, their projects does come with a patents license, in addition to the copyright license, but it's unclear to me whether this license applies to derivative works for example. I'm not a lawyer of course and I have a very limited understanding, but interpreting their license as an English text, I really don't think it applies to derivate works. Would like an analysis of somebody knowledgeable, because a project that can't be safely forked isn't open source. Here's their license: https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/blob/master/PATENTS.TXT
Anyway, my point is that I would have preferred something like the Apache License, which is still permissive, but was written by lawyers that know what they are doing and has an explicit patents grant in it. You see, people think of BSD and MIT as being "permissive", but that's only true as far as the copyright law is concerned. Patents are a whole different thing.
Yeah, but when MS used their own MIT-like license with patent grant and nuclear patent option, people hated it. They have made certain guarantees in the past wrt ASP.Net bits and other areas... MS seems to have been mostly in favor of live and let live wrt patents on their open-source software, it would be a colossal mistake for them to sue over patent use on their open-source software, short of defensively against someone suing them over patents.