Re: [ossig] Microsoft going round promoting .net

[Ditesh Kumar <ditesh@ameba6.com>]

Interesting.

The problem though is that with shared source, you can't combine GPL
with the shared source - it's specifically not allowed:

This as an aside:

Interesting to note that the Fellow is from MMU. I studied there and I
know that several big vendors were throwing labs, equipment, software
etc to the IT and Engineering faculties.I do remember that the IT
faculty was running MS servers etc and they got cracked. However, a
popular student server there was running FreeBSD (there was a small BSD
group there). The Engineering faculty website (notes, online apps etc)
is (was?) fully linux and php based, and it ran steadily for the 3 years
I was there - I can't remember any downtime at all.

AFAIK, in the Engineering faculty at least, Linux and other Free/Open
Source software is rather popular. Things may have changed though.

Ditesh

On Thu, 2003-03-20 at 18:04, Imran William Smith wrote:
> MS did a presentation here (Mimos) today on .NET, hoping
> to target the technology research people within Mimos.
> 
> 
> They are keen to give out CD's with .NET shared source
> on them, inviting us to duplicate them, give them out,
> have a good browse through the information and code.  Only
> when I quizzed them about the licensing agreement did they
> admit that there was a license agreement, but glossed
> over it somewhat with 'it's a few pages of legal
> stuff, actually I didn't read it fully myself'.  The guy
> presenting (Dr. Wong Chek Yoon, MicroSoft Visiting Fellow,
> Multimedia University) was kind enough to email me
> the full license agreement afterwards.
> 
> The key phrase is probably:
> 
> "You may use any information in intangible form that you remember after
> accessing the Software.  However, this right does not grant you a
> license to any of Microsoft's copyrights or patents for anything you
> might create using such information."
> 
> 
> The license is somewhat GPL-like - you can modify and
> redistribute but only under the terms of the original license,
> and if you try to sue anyone for patent infringement, the license 
> automatically ends.
> 
> 
> 
> It looks to me like
> MS is actively pushing sharedsource code at developers.
> They're trying to get mindset in academic world, saying
> 'this source code will help you do technology research'.
> They spin it as 'help the world of technology move forward',
> rather than 'help the world of *Microsoft* technology
> move forward'.
> 
> 
> How best to counter?  Just keep the open source PR
> machine rolling?
> 
> 
> Imran
-- 
Ditesh Kumar
Ameba6 Solutions Sdn. Bhd.
--
"Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits
is, of course, in a state of sin." - John Von Neumann



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