Does Anyone Out There Understand The Microsoft Public License?

Seriously, I’ve raised the subject of this before, but it’s getting to be a bit of a joke.  Take a look at this recent discussion on the castle list.  Whereas the Free Software Foundation will tell anyone who cares to listen (and frankly, many who’d rather not) the minutiae of compliance with the various versions of the GPL, Microsoft can’t or won’t answer a straight question about what they regard as being compliant with a license they themselves drafted.  Rather laughably, they then point amateur open source projects at lawyers.  Lawyers who are going to tell them “well, it depends, there’s no case law on the subject”.

Believe me, I would love to see a good answer to this question, but as it is it’s hard to recommend the use of this licence to anyone.  I think people who do choose to use it are going to be receiving a lot of requests for dual licensing.

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Julian Birch

Full time dad, does a bit of coding on the side.

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