Thank you for the rapid response and for concisely representing my
concern. I won't belabor your decision but I will admit that I am bit
more skeptical about associating "common sense" with some of the
rulings and dicta of U.S. copyright law. :)
I also thank you for the suggestion that I contact Michele Herman to
discover Microsoft's understanding of the scope of their license;
though I would consider that more in the nature of philosophical
inquiry as it would seem the more legitimate concern would target the
intent (or perhaps even the degree of caprice) of the copyright holder
of any MS-PLed code in question.
Regards.
P.S. The link provided in reference #8 of my post was incorrect and
should have been:
http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.pdf
If that does not work then the appropriate PDF can be found by
visiting http://www.copyright.gov/circs .
Quoting Richard Fontana <rfontana@xxxxxxxxxx>:
On Sat, 05 Dec 2009 13:31:28 -0500
saulgoode@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
I won't speculate as to whether it was the intent of the authors of
the Microsoft Public License to consider "mere aggregation" to be
excluded from the scope of their reciprocal terms and
conditions[14], but regardless of their intent it seems that lack of
an exception being explicitly provided within the license itself may
potentially lead to a court decision that inclusion of both MS-PLed
and GPLed software within a Fedora distribution constitutes
copyright infringement -- not because the terms of the GPL weren't
met, but that those of the MS-PL were not met.
I think you're arguing that we should consider the possibility that the
MS-PL is what I'll call a 'hyper-strong' copyleft license, with a
copyleft scope broader than that traditionally assumed by consensus of
GPL-licensing communities to apply to the GPL, extending to
combinations that would not have any copyleft implications in a GPL
context, if only because of the latter's 'mere aggregation' clause.[1]
The particular concern you have is that the MS-PL intended copyleft
scope could extend to whole compilations in the copyright law sense, as
for example all the code in a Fedora .iso that happens to contain one
package licensed under MS-PL.
There are a number of reasons, largely involving common sense and
cultural intuition, why I think it is *extremely* unlikely that such an
interpretation was intended by Microsoft (or other licensors using the
MS-PL or would be adopted by such licensors or by a court construing
this license. The likelihood is so remote that I think we can safely
ignore it. However, if the issue continues to concern you, you may wish
to contact Microsoft to get clarification from the horse's mouth.
(Michele Herman at Microsoft's outside counsel firm Woodcock Washburn
might be the best contact.)
- Richard
[1]Although I think the historical evidence shows that Richard Stallman
added the mere aggregation clause to proto-versions of the GPL so he
would stop getting questions about whether it was okay to distribute
GNU software and unrelated proprietary software on the same tape, an
issue he seems to have thought should have been obvious.
--
Richard E. Fontana
Open Source Licensing and Patent Counsel
Red Hat, Inc.
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