As with other individuals and organizations, we too have seen the proliferation of source code licenses become problematic. We had 10+ Shared Source licenses, and as more and more product groups sought to use source code releases as a means to work with developer communities, this number was only going to rise further. |
For those in community it's interesting. For the broader community, it's probably not that compelling, ... But for those 600 partners, it's going to let them communally develop this technology in order to serve the customer base. |
I think people should be able to say critical things about Microsoft, but that should be completely separate from being a neutral body for any and all the players in the industry to be able to make use of your standard. |
Look at commercial open source companies. How different is Red Hat's business model from Microsoft's? I'd say it's pretty marginal. |
Microsoft still has plenty of room to grow in this space. |
Open source is the same thing as proprietary code in that it belongs to the author, who can choose how to license it, |
So a service contract that says you can't modify source code isn't about being against open source, ... It's about saying 'Hey, I want to be able to deliver to you additional value, and if I send you a patch automatically and you change the source code, it may blow up your computer.' |
To us, that is a more commercially reasonable approach to the mechanism of reciprocal licensing. |