Microsoft Open Sources ASP.NET MVC 227
Jimmy Zimms writes "Microsoft's ASP.NET MVC is an extension built on the core of ASP.NET that brings some of the popular practices and ease of development that were popularized by Ruby on Rails and Django to the .NET developers.
Scott Guthrie, the inventor of ASP.NET, just announced that
Microsoft is open sourcing the ASP.NET MVC stack under the MS-PL license. 'I'm excited today to announce that we are also releasing the ASP.NET MVC source code under the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL). MS-PL is an OSI-approved open source license. The MS-PL contains no platform restrictions and provides broad rights to modify and redistribute the source code.' Here's the text of the MS-PL.
Re:Typical (Score:5, Informative)
The MS-PL is a Free Software license, according to the FSF. It's just not compatible with the GPL.
There are multiple "shared source" licenses, some Free, others not: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_source [wikipedia.org]
MS-PL (Score:5, Informative)
I really don't /want/ to like the MS-PL or anything Microsoft, but I read it, and re-read it, and I can't see anything wrong with it. In fact, at the risk of being modded to oblivion, I gotta' say it's a far cry easier to understand than the GPL license, seems straightforward, and truly "open." It seems roughly as open as the BSD license. It doesn't even require you to open your own code under the same license. What am I missing? Is this a late April Fools' joke?
Re:Hardly open source (Score:2, Informative)
The GPL is also deliberately incompatible with their competition, particularly including other open licenses. So what's your point? If you think "Open" means "You can do whatever you want", then you're restricting yourself to pretty much just bsd, which is an entirely separate holy war.
Re:MS-PL (Score:1, Informative)
It doesn't even require you to open your own code under the same license.
I'm not sure, but wouldn't that be the part here:
If you distribute any portion of the software in source code form, you may do so only under this license by including a complete copy of this license with your distribution. If you distribute any portion of the software in compiled or object code form, you may only do so under a license that complies with this license.
Anyway, I know it's paranoid of me, but I wouldn't trust Microsoft or their MS-PL any farther than I could throw them. Doesn't everyone remember the three Es?
I see no reason to believe that they wouldn't stoop to any level to destroy their competitors, and if this plague becomes common in the FOSS community I can only see it leading to trouble.
Re:The point of the story... (Score:3, Informative)
Doesn't the GPLv3 have a statement similar to this?
AFAIK the GPL3 says you have to open up your patents along with the source. It does not mention challenging the patents of others.
Whenever someone conveys software covered by GPLv3 that they've written or modified, they must provide every recipient with any patent licenses necessary to exercise the rights that the GPL gives them. In addition to that, if any licensee tries to use a patent suit to stop another user from exercising those rights, their license will be terminated.
What this means for users and developers is that they'll be able to work with GPLv3-covered software without worrying that a desperate contributor will try to sue them for patent infringement later. With these changes, GPLv3 affords its users more defenses against patent aggression than any other free software license.
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.html [fsf.org]
I'm not sure though, feel free to correct me.
Re:Typical (Score:3, Informative)
The patent claim section. If you ever bring a patent claim against a contributor to the MS-PL licensed project you lose all rights under the license...
So if you develop around one of these code bases you are giving MS a one-way patent non-aggression pact, they are giving you nothing of the sort in return.
Re:MS-PL (Score:3, Informative)
ASP.NET MVC runs on Mono 2.4 out of the box.
Not only does it run, but you can now install a MonoDevelop plugin that will provide all the tooling to get the Linux developer experience to match the Visual Studio experience for MVC development.
It is quite sweet.
Re:Uh, yeah.... (Score:5, Informative)
I agree that Visual Studio is a very nice tool.
Luckily the code that you produce with Visual Studio will run on Mono (no recompilations necessary) including code that uses ASP.NET MVC. And with the new support for ASP.NET precompiled sites in Mono (available in Mono 2.4) you do not even need to copy the source code to your target server.
Click "Publish" in visual studio, enter the location for your shared directory, and you have a fully working ASP.NET MVC app running on Linux, without leaving Windows.
We are working on various integration points for Visual Studio that will give developers even more: debugging from Visual Studio remote applications deployed on Linux systems and producing packages ready-for-distribution on Linux.
Re:Typical (Score:3, Informative)
read the FSF's actual published opinion about licenses other than the GPL [gnu.org] and then mod the parent "trolling for sanity" (as in screwing for virginity).
How is that any different than something like GPL? (Score:5, Informative)
I think that clause is fairly reasonable if I use that license for my code. If somebody is gonna bring a patent claim against my stuff, screw them, they loose the license to use my work.
How is this different than similar patent clauses in other licenses?
Re:Typical (Score:5, Informative)
(3.B) If you bring a patent claim against any contributor over patents that you claim are infringed by the software, your patent license from such contributor to the software ends automatically.
You can bring patent claims, as long you're not claiming THIS software violates your patents. If you claim the software infringes YOUR patents, and aren't willing to allow that -- then you don't get a free pass on THEIR patents either. Ie: Share and Share alike. Also, your license for the software doesn't terminate -- just your license to the patents. Which brings us to:
(2.B) Patent Grant- Subject to the terms of this license, including the license conditions and limitations in section 3, each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license under its licensed patents...
So it's not a one-way non-agression pact. It's a two-way pact. As long as you don't sue them for patent infringement, you can (re)use all of their code without fear of them suing you for patent infringement... Of course, since THEY are the ones giving YOU the source code, this is really slanted heavily in your favor -- you can have a look before you use it, decide if they violate your patents, and THEN choose to use it OR sue them. They have no such recourse.
Re:Typical (Score:4, Informative)
This is untrue.
First, they ARE providing something to you: a world-wide, non-exclusive, royalty-free patent license. They can't sue you over patents in their code base; they already gave you a license to them.
Second, if you bring a patent claim against a contributor over code covered by the MS-PL (not just any code they wrote, as you implied) then you don't lose all rights, you only lose the royalty-free patent license from that specific contributor.
Example: Microsoft releases some code (call it code-base A) under MS-PL. It contains patented algorithm X.
You take A and extend it. Your extension (code-base B) contains an improvement on X, which you have patented. Call this improved version Y.
If Microsoft sues you over Y (which is basically a better X) then they lose the right to use Y, meaning that if Y is upheld they would have to license it from you. Furthermore, even if they win the case and the patent on Y is invalidated, X can still be used free of charge; they can't revoke your license to use it.
This seems a fair way to handle software patents in open-source software; a sort of copyleft scheme applied to patent right rather than copyright.
Mind you, IANAL, but the terminology seems pretty clear.
Re:Typical (Score:1, Informative)
The patent claim section. If you ever bring a patent claim against a contributor to the MS-PL licensed project you lose all rights under the license...
So if you develop around one of these code bases you are giving MS a one-way patent non-aggression pact, they are giving you nothing of the sort in return.
It's not a one-way non-aggression pact, they're making the same promise to you by releasing the code in MS-PL in the first place.
Basically, the license doesn't say that you can never sue Microsoft for violating your patents. It says that if you have any patent claims on code that you licensed as MS-PL, you can't turn around and sue people who create derivative works using your code for violating your patents. It's the same hole the FSF was trying to close with the GPL 3.
The promise applies to Microsoft too. If you take their MS-PL licensed code, and then build a derivative work using their license, they can't sue you for violating the patent.
The license is something of a BSD / GPL hybrid. You can distribute binaries without source code like the BSD (because Microsoft really dislikes that the GPL doesn't allow that), and you have to give permission for use of your patents like the GPL 3 (because Microsoft doesnt' want you to bait them and then sue them).
Re:Whoever modded this troll (Score:3, Informative)
3) BSD guys merge changes back into their code.
Step 3 is illegal. It violates the GPL license. You are not allowed to distribute GPL licensed code (the improvements the GPL guys did) under a non GPL license.
That is the whole point of the grandparent saying that the GPL is a black hole. Because it really is. It is the leecher license of open source licenses, wanting other licenses to be one-way "compatible" with it so that it can leech code from them, but not wanting to give anything in return.
Re:Typical (Score:3, Informative)
Are you kidding me?
I bought my home NAS (a Thecus) specifically because it was using linux for firmware. Thanks to that fact, I have hacked my own custom firmware with all the tools and services I need. Thanks to that there is an entire community hacking the Thecus models. Compare that to any BSD based NAS, where you get a binary firmware, which means no tinkering.
I've always tried explaining it like this:
Author -> (developers)* -> End User
Proprietary -> BSD -> GPL
With a proprietary license all rights are reserved to the author. If the author chooses a BSD license, most rights are passed to the developers including the right to make it, for all intents and purposed, proprietary. If the author however chooses the GPL, he can be assured that the rights will get passed all the way to the end-user, no matter how many developers there are between the original author and the end-user.
And that is why I GPL all my code, look for products using GPL'd code, and why the GPL most certainly is a solution to a problem that exists today.
Re:Uh, yeah.... (Score:3, Informative)
Does mono still have that absolutely asstastic garbage collector that is non-compacting?
You can make mono compatible with silly shit like publishing from visual studio which is useless in a production environment(unless your a complete idiot and let your developers publish directly). So while thats cool and useful for school kids working on class projects, there are far more important things that need to be fixed in mono than visual studio integration.
You might want to fix the garbage collector so the web server doesn't have to be restarted all the time due to running out of memory due to the shitty garbage collector. If I wanted to deal with memory fragmentation and relocation I'd write in C, without all the .NET overhead and just do it myself. Until mono has a garbage collector that doesn't suck complete ass, its worthless for any sort of production work.
I quote from: http://www.mono-project.com/FAQ:_ASP.NET [mono-project.com]
Stop spending your time doing integration with visual studio and make the engine not suck ass. Mono is practically pointless if it doesn't do memory management for shit. All it is otherwise is a big fat massively bloated library loader with its own set of bugs. I'll just stick with C and ld if thats the case, or as I do now unfortunately, run windows asp.net web servers.
Is this part of the Microsoft embrace and extend/extinguish attack on linux via mono? Make it look pretty and inter operate with shit no one cares about on the surface (but sounds good in marketing copy), but under the hood its just like the MS JVM, broken intentionally with no hope of repair? You know what happened when Microsoft tried this? People just stopped using the MS version. If you're going to do that with mono, why the fuck even bother making it. Just come out and say 'MS is the way to go for .NET'. You're not going to upset any major projects or anything, they don't use Mono anyway, and all the kids in school can download the free MS shit for their little projects.