Not really. I'm a big fan of MIT style licenses, but it also means that Microsoft could at anytime start making proprietary updates.
It could mean we could start adopting it and then at some point down the road they could discontinue the open version and start making closed features/updates.
Don't get me wrong, I'm very pleased that this is the direction Microsoft is taking. I am just still very skeptical.
The MIT License arguably protects against patent litigation (in contrast to BSD).
People who have an issue with the MIT License (on the patent issue) fall into one of two categories:
a) People who've put it in the same category with BSD in their heads at some point, associating with it the same shared caveat about patents, and
b) People who understand the distinction between the two but are unsatisfied with how terse it is (especially in contrast to e.g., Apache 2.0). This isn't helped by the fact that the MIT License doesn't actually use the word "patent", and the closest it gets to saying "irrevocable" is "without restriction"/"without limitation".
In any case, Microsoft also included a custom patent grant at the time they announced the CLR's availability on GitHub and its new, more agreeable license terms. (Unfortunately it doesn't include the word "irrevocable", either.)
Pardon my ignorance, but I've never adventured too much into licensing stuff myself, and always had this kind of silly question roaming in my mind: what would happen if someone - after releasing some code open-source with the most permissive license, say on Github - immediately after changed their mind and changed the license back to a very restrictive one and someone had forked the project in that short range of time? Would their forked repository with the permissive license version be a totally legit code repository ?
I know this is sounds silly, but I wonder if it's a thing or not that when a software company publicly releases some valuable code open-source, then there is always someone thinking: "better fork this as quick as possible! you never know!" :)
They can close-source it again, they can't stop you using the open source version they did release. If you have the licence, you have the licence, and it is perpetual. You can't unscramble the egg.
There are quite a few products around which fit that type of scenario - where an older, free version is still circulating while the company now distributes a close source paid version.
The code that will allow the software to run on Linux and Mac OS has not yet been built. “It will be a few months before you can get your hand on this." -Somasegar
https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr
MIT license
Checkmate Stallman.
Not really. I'm a big fan of MIT style licenses, but it also means that Microsoft could at anytime start making proprietary updates.
It could mean we could start adopting it and then at some point down the road they could discontinue the open version and start making closed features/updates.
Don't get me wrong, I'm very pleased that this is the direction Microsoft is taking. I am just still very skeptical.
15 replies →
How about patent use grants, hmm?
If I remember correctly, Microsoft is making a lot of money off of Android by licensing patents.
The MIT License arguably protects against patent litigation (in contrast to BSD).
People who have an issue with the MIT License (on the patent issue) fall into one of two categories:
a) People who've put it in the same category with BSD in their heads at some point, associating with it the same shared caveat about patents, and
b) People who understand the distinction between the two but are unsatisfied with how terse it is (especially in contrast to e.g., Apache 2.0). This isn't helped by the fact that the MIT License doesn't actually use the word "patent", and the closest it gets to saying "irrevocable" is "without restriction"/"without limitation".
In any case, Microsoft also included a custom patent grant at the time they announced the CLR's availability on GitHub and its new, more agreeable license terms. (Unfortunately it doesn't include the word "irrevocable", either.)
https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/blob/master/PATENTS.TXT
Pardon my ignorance, but I've never adventured too much into licensing stuff myself, and always had this kind of silly question roaming in my mind: what would happen if someone - after releasing some code open-source with the most permissive license, say on Github - immediately after changed their mind and changed the license back to a very restrictive one and someone had forked the project in that short range of time? Would their forked repository with the permissive license version be a totally legit code repository ?
I know this is sounds silly, but I wonder if it's a thing or not that when a software company publicly releases some valuable code open-source, then there is always someone thinking: "better fork this as quick as possible! you never know!" :)
They can close-source it again, they can't stop you using the open source version they did release. If you have the licence, you have the licence, and it is perpetual. You can't unscramble the egg.
There are quite a few products around which fit that type of scenario - where an older, free version is still circulating while the company now distributes a close source paid version.
The code that will allow the software to run on Linux and Mac OS has not yet been built. “It will be a few months before you can get your hand on this." -Somasegar