Microsoft Open Sources ASP.NET MVC

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:The point of the story...

[Jurily]

FTFL:

(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.

Is this compatible with any other open source licences?

Read it

[Sp4c3 C4d3t]

If you read it you'll find out that it's basically the BSD license. Why jump to conclusions just because it's Microsoft?

Re:Major milestones

[Anonymous Coward]

Plagiarizer... from http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/04/01/asp-net-mvc-1-0.aspx [asp.net] ...

# re: ASP.NET MVC 1.0
Thursday, April 02, 2009 6:34 AM by Alastair Smith

Scott, this is fantastic news! The EULA in the installer seems incompatible with this milestone, however:

"2. Scope of License. The software is licensed, not sold. This agreement only gives you some rights to use the software. Microsoft reserves all other rights. Unless applicable law gives you more rights despite this limitation, you may use the software only as expressly permitted in this agreement. In doing so, you must comply with any technical limitations in the software that only allow you to use it in certain ways. You may not

  * work around any technical limitations in the software;

  * reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble the software, except and only to the extent that applicable law expressly permits, despite this limitation;

  * publish the software for others to copy;

  * rent, lease or lend the software; or

  * __transfer the software or this agreement to any third party.__"

We rely on ASP.NET MVC for a couple of products that we sell to customers (for them to install locally, not in a SaaS-type environment). That EULA clause would appear to prevent us from re-distributing ASP.NET MVC in any form (even the pre-packaged installer). Please could you clarify?

2nd time today I've nailed you, but this is getting old. Have you tried cordless bungee jumping? Blog about that, wouldja?

Re:Hardly open source

[spitzak]

It's impossible to be compatible with the BSD license and not be compatible with the GPL, because BSD is compatible with the GPL.

Unless you have some strange backwards definition of compatible, under which you would say "the GPL is compatible with the BSD license" because you can take BSD code and relicense it as GPL. However I think most people consider that statement false, while "the BSD is compatible with the GPL" is the true statement.

The fact is that BSD is compatible with the MS-PL and BSD is compatible with GPL. The BSD is compatible with a *lot* of licenses, including closed-source with a NDA.

Re:MS-PL

[Anachragnome]

I'm a self-proclaimed EULA/License Nazi, and I have to agree.

It did occur to me that Microsoft might actually have a toe in the pool of common sense...testing the waters, so to speak. Play fair and see what happens?

This is a good thing, no?

Will MS-PL Overshadow GPL?

[jacksinn]

I'm just slightly concerned that all the work that has been put into the GPL by FSF (of which I'm a member thus a bit biased) and others will be overshadowed - at least in the mainstream - by Microsoft's step into open source. I support organizations' forays into FOSS, but I'm concerned that Microsoft is trying to eventually be perceived as the leader of FOSS development. And maybe I'm paranoid.

Re:Hardly open source

[datastew]

> How so? It's accepted as a free software license not only by the OSI but by the FSF as well.

Actually this may be a bit misleading. The MS-PL is firmly on their list of "GPL-Incompatible Free Software Licenses" [fsf.org]. This means that they urge you not use this license and it is incompatible with the GNU GPL.

Hah

[coryking]

You are funny. Did you read that page? Pretty much every damn license in existance is incompatible with the GPL. But the "fun" one is this:

OpenSSL license .... ...We recommend using GNUTLS instead of OpenSSL in software you write. However, there is no reason not to use OpenSSL and applications that work with OpenSSL.

Yeah, right. Reminds me of this gem buried in the old man pages for the GNU implementation of su [freebsd.org]:

This program does not support a "wheel group" that restricts who can su to super-user accounts, because that can help fascist system administrators hold unwarranted power over other users.

Yeah, screw security! Who needs passwords! Down with sysadmins!!

I might as well quote the rest of it because it is so juice and nobody will bother to follow the link above:

Why GNU su does not support the wheel group (by Richard Stallman)
Sometimes a few of the users try to hold total power over all the rest. For
example, in 1984, a few users at the MIT AI lab decided to seize power by
changing the operator password on the Twenex system and keep- ing it secret from
everyone else. (I was able to thwart this coup and give power back to the
users by patching the kernel, but I wouldn't know how to do that in Unix.)

However, occasionally the rulers do tell someone. Under the usual su
mechanism, once someone learns the root password who sympathizes with the
ordinary users, he can tell the rest. The "wheel group" feature would make
this impossible, and thus cement the power of the rulers.

I'm on the side of the masses, not that of the rulers. If you are used to
supporting the bosses and sysadmins in whatever they do, you might find this
idea strange at first.

PS: Just realized that the FreeBSD man-page thingy offers way more man pages than just for FreeBSD. Check it out!

Re:Hardly open source

[spitzak]

You can put BSD code into a GPL program, exactly as you state.

You cannot put MS-PL code into a BSD program. If you could, then you could put it into a GPL program, since you can put BSD code into a GPL program!

The two licenses are IDENTICAL. BSD is compatible with both of them. They are both incompatible with the BSD and with each other.

Pretending that somehow the original BSD code vaporizes and disappears when somebody uses it in a GPL program, but this magical effect does not happen with the MS-PL program is a nice piece of FUD, too.

Re:Typical

[kripkenstein]

The GPL is a solution for a problem that doesn't exist anymore. Big unix is dead. Open source is here and it has the momentum, but the GPL is dead weight. What if GPL code suddenly turned to BSD code and Microsoft (or anyone else) could steal it? History has shown that private forks of open source software generally don't work.

No, private forks often work. Look at what Apple did with BSD, what IBM did with OpenOffice and Apache, etc. etc. Also look at what Apple would have done with KHTML if it didn't have to keep it open (I presume what it did with BSD).

The GPL and LGPL are very important for various reasons. Another is that it allows profitable dual-licensing models, such as used by Sun and Nokia. The BSD doesn't allow that. There is a place for both types of licenses.