Yesterday at the Euro Open Source Convention, Microsoft announced 5 new Shared Source licenses. 2 of these licenses are derivatives of the main 3 licenses, creating 5 new licenses in total.
The 2 derivate licenses have the following clause:
(F) Platform Limitation- The licenses granted in sections 2(A) &
2(B) extend only to the software or larger works that you create that
run on a Microsoft Windows operating system product.
It would be a travesty if this license was over-used by Microsoft. Imagine if IronPython could no longer run on Linux or even MacOS. Still, I believe Microsoft will have trouble making that clause stick - I'm not a lawyer, but would Wine, Project David or even ReactOS be considered OK? They are all "Windows compatible" - does that fact make it OK? What if I were to take a DLL or operating system component from a genuine Microsoft Windows system and run it under Wine or ReactOS - or even if I took a Microsoft NIC driver and ran it under Linux using NDisWrapper? Does that pass scrutiny?
Now, as we all know, Windows NT is a very different product to Windows CE, they just have a similar Win32 API and have some icons in common. Is Windows CE even covered by this clause? Perhaps Mr Lessig could help out.
BTW - I've used ReactOS and it's a seriously impressive product. It's still very much early stages but should be considered usable for everyday tasks within a couple of months.
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