The Future of Shared Source Code at MS
Microsoft has this week created three new licenses for use with future Microsoft Shared Source programs:
-
The Microsoft Community License allows people to modify and redistribute code for either commercial or non-commercial purposes and requires them to share their modification back with the community.
-
The intent of the reciprocal license is to use licensing as a mechanism to keep certain community-based code “in the community,” while allowing companies to commercialize and license (under terms of their choice) their “value add” code that interacts with the community-based code.
-
The copyright and patent grants are both royalty free, meaning that you do not have to pay anything to Microsoft to make use of the source code. You do need to keep any notices in the code for copyright, patent, trademarks, or for any other forms of attribution.
-
-
The Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL) is the least restrictive of the Microsoft source code licenses. It allows you to view, modify, and redistribute the source code for either commercial or non-commercial purposes. Under the Ms-PL, you may change the source code and share it with others. You may also charge a licensing fee for your modified work if you wish.
-
The copyright and patent grants are both royalty free, meaning that you do not have to pay anything to Microsoft to make use of the source code. There is no obligation for you to publish any changes you make in either binary or source code form. You do need to keep any notices in the code for copyright, patent, trademarks, or for any other forms of attribution.
-
Microsoft has created limited versions of the Ms-CL and Ms-PL that require code to be used to restrict usage to the Windows platform only.
-
-
The Microsoft Reference License (Ms-RL) is the most restrictive of the Microsoft source code licenses. The license prohibits all use of source code other than the viewing of the code for reference purposes. The intent of this license is to enable Microsoft to release, for review purposes only, more sensitive intellectual property assets.
-
The most common use of this license will be with developer libraries where modification is not a requirement for making use of the source code. In these cases, the importance of transparency is based on the need for developers to more deeply understand the inner workings of a specific set of technology. In doing so, the developers will be more effective in writing software that makes use of the shared library.
-
The copyright and patent grants are both royalty free, meaning that you do not have to pay anything to Microsoft to make use of the source code. The license limits the source code release to use on the Windows platform only.
These new licenses for distribution of future versions of Shared Source code will serve to strengthen MS' position against Open Source by further empowering our developer community, in that:
- The new licenses are shorter and easier to understand.
- They streamline our efforts to release new code.
- They provide consistent IP protection.
For general information on these advances in licensing future Shared Source releases, see the MS Shared Source Licensing page.
