October 3rd, 2007
You can look but you better not touch
Microsoft tried to tiptoe onto the open source incline today by releasing the .Net Framework under what it calls the Microsoft Reference License.
You may read the license language here, or just read this from guest analyst Mr. Bruce Springsteen:
I came home from work and I switched on Channel 5
There was a pretty little girly lookin’ straight into my eyes
Well I watched as she wiggled back and forth across the screen
She didn’t get me excited she just made me feel mean
Yes, The Boss has been an astute tech analyst even longer than John Dvorak.
The lyric neatly sums up the attitude of the open source community to the Microsoft announcement. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols calls it “an open source trap.” Dave Rosenberg calls it “a patent trolling dream.” William Hurley says Microsoft is going “open source,” and those quote marks are his point.
The Reference License lets you look at code, but you can’t redistribute it, and you can’t modify it.
It is, as all these esteemed analysts note, a way of putting developers on notice that if anything they write (for, say Mono) looks anything like what’s in the .Net Framework, Microsoft’s lawyers will go all RIAA on their epidermis.
Or, as The Boss wrote in his column, “mess around, you’ll wind up in Dutch boy, you can look but you better not, no no you better not, no you better not touch.” (Blow Big Man.) A new collection of Springsteen’s blog posts is now available from Amazon.Com.
Next week, I hope to get Miley Cyrus in to analyze the Novell deal.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 10/03/07
