Posted by: Anonymous
[ip: 67.167.59.236]
on August 18, 2007 11:30 PM
Chris DiBona of Google Inc. has asked the question if the OSI license submission ment that Microsoft would "stop using the market confusing term Shared Source." While I disagree on several things, I think this question deserves a reasonable answer. Rather than answering the question, instead Bill Hilf provided the excuse that "the reasons we continued to call it the 'Shared Source' program was to acknowledge that these licenses had not been approved by the OSI." [1]
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Based on what was said by Bill Hilf, a project covered under MS-CL or MS-PL should be referred in Microsoft marketing as a "Shared Source" application. But with the Sharedpoint Learning Kit, covered by the MS-CL [2], the term used by Microsoft is "open source application." [3] Independent of approval by the OSI, Microsoft has already pre-approved it's use of "Shared Source" and "open source" as interchangeable terms in a way that appears to be an attempt to purposely confuse. This could even be seen as a method to disrupt the moment that the previous open source terminology had gain in the popular press. Regardless of the intention, Microsoft's use of SS and OS as interchangeable terms is not consistent with Bill Hilf's claim.
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So, this leads back to DiBona's question which is still left without a reasonable answer. Will Microsoft stop using the marketing term Shared Source as a method to confuse? If Microsoft is serious about working with the OSI, why is SS already used as an interchangeable term before the OSI has even approved the licenses?
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[1] http://www.crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3:mss:13385:200708:mkohfpmjekmjelobgffa
[2] http://www.codeplex.com/SLK/Project/License.aspx
[3] http://www.microsoft.com/opensource/choice.mspx
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Bill Hilf caught in a lie!
Posted by: Anonymous [ip: 67.167.59.236] on August 18, 2007 11:30 PM.
Based on what was said by Bill Hilf, a project covered under MS-CL or MS-PL should be referred in Microsoft marketing as a "Shared Source" application. But with the Sharedpoint Learning Kit, covered by the MS-CL [2], the term used by Microsoft is "open source application." [3] Independent of approval by the OSI, Microsoft has already pre-approved it's use of "Shared Source" and "open source" as interchangeable terms in a way that appears to be an attempt to purposely confuse. This could even be seen as a method to disrupt the moment that the previous open source terminology had gain in the popular press. Regardless of the intention, Microsoft's use of SS and OS as interchangeable terms is not consistent with Bill Hilf's claim.
.
So, this leads back to DiBona's question which is still left without a reasonable answer. Will Microsoft stop using the marketing term Shared Source as a method to confuse? If Microsoft is serious about working with the OSI, why is SS already used as an interchangeable term before the OSI has even approved the licenses?
.
[1] http://www.crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3:mss:13385:200708:mkohfpmjekmjelobgffa
[2] http://www.codeplex.com/SLK/Project/License.aspx
[3] http://www.microsoft.com/opensource/choice.mspx
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