Opening up my newsreader today and being exposed to cacophony of news bits about Microsoft's Singularity platform, and seeing all the likely PR mouthpieces like Om Malik blogging about it, I decided to take a closer look at their license agreement.
At this point in time I accept the authority of the Open Source Initiative for approval of various open source licenses. Let it be known that two licenses of Microsoft origin have been approved by the OSI (Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL), Microsoft Reciprocal License (Ms-RL) ). Microsoft's Singularity project does not fall under the licensing schema of either of these approved licenses. For all intents and purposes, this project is not approved open source by any credible officiating body.
A very quick look at the Microsoft Research License Agreement.
a few things stand out:
"You may not use or distribute this Software or any derivative works in any form for commercial purposes."
"You may create derivative works of the Software source code and distribute the modified Software solely for non-commercial academic purposes"
In other words, you can spend days or weeks analyzing and hacking this code, but if you try to turn it into a commercial enterprise, you have to buy a license. What kind of Open Source is that? Who wants to learn a platform that isn't free? Who wants to invest time learning APIs, etc. for an inferior, proprietary product?
Verdict: Yet another Marketing Ploy from Redmond. Hackers beware!
note to readers : looks like we have a Wikipedia PR war!
3 comments:
If you have even looked at this product you would see that it is only useful for research.... such as is stated all over everything Microsoft has posted about it. The "APIs" you are so worried about will look nothing like what is in this product when and if it ever hits a store shelf. Simply put get over yourself and find something else to whine about.
Not much of a war if you are the only one on your side
Matthew,
Why is that the only links that are tolerated by the 'community' are links to Microsoft domains? Secondly two people tried to comment on the license and the comments were erased.
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