Microsoft Sings a New Tune—Wants to Play Nice With Open-Source
Written by on February 21st, 2008 in Ajax News.
Wow, Ray Ozzie is really changing the culture at Microsoft. After years in denial, Redmond has finally decided to stop trying to fight open-source software. In a series of moves announced today aimed at making its products more interoperable with other software and the Web in general, Microsoft is releasing 30,000 pages of documentation for Windows (both desktop and server products) that were previously available to partners only through a trade secret license. It is making available new licenses to a large number of its software patents “on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, at low royalty rates.” And teh company is making the following pledge to open-source developers:
Microsoft is providing a covenant not to sue open source developers for development or non-commercial distribution of implementations of these protocols. These developers will be able to use the documentation for free to develop products. Companies that engage in commercial distribution of these protocol implementations will be able to obtain a patent license from Microsoft, as will enterprises that obtain these implementations from a distributor that does not have such a patent license.
Microosft has set up a Website with more information here.
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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/238896087/