Ian Pilcher wrote:
According to Slashdot, Microsoft has released the Windows CE source code under one of their "shared source" licenses. Needless to say, it would be an *extremely* bad idea for anyone associated with the Wine project to look at it.
While I agree that it is probably not a great idea to look at the CE code at this point, Microsoft's 'Shared Source' license is *very* interesting in a number of respects. First and foremost, the license is by far the most simple and straightforward software copyright license that I have ever seen. There is barely a hint of legalese about it.
As such, it appears to me that there may be some interesting ways in which the license can be exploited to benefit Wine. 8-)
Note that I'm not suggesting that anyone go out and do this without spending a fair bit of time (and money, unfortunately) with a lawyer. Certainly, no one at TransGaming is going to be downloading or looking at those sources.
So - on to some analysis of the license. Everything below is based only on my own personal understanding of the legal issues involved, nothing more.
This License governs use of the accompanying Software.
Well, first off, copyright law generally governs copying, not use. Attempts to overreach the provisions of copyright law through additional clauses in shrink-wrap/click-wrap and other contracts have been turned aside in some court cases. In the US, federal copyright law trumps state contract law, from what I've read. Thus, the license starts off on shaky ground.
You can use this Software for any non-commercial purpose, including distributing derivatives. Running your business operations would not be considered non-commercial.
Again, the use issue rears its head. Another interesting question here is the one of derivatives. It is possible that knowledge gained by study of the source code, which is then applied to Wine, would not in and of itself cause Wine to become a 'derived' work, assuming that no actual source code was used. It is a somewhat grey area that I don't know very well, but it may be worth investigating.
For commercial purposes, you can reference this software solely to assist in developing and testing your own software and hardware for the Windows CE platform.
Here again, we have the usage issue, as well as the platform-restrictive clause for commercial users. The platform restrictions may constitute anti-competitive 'copyright misuse', and thus be unenforceable. The language used here is also interesting - they say 'reference', rather than 'use'. I suspect that they are trying to explicitly restrict efforts like Wine from even studying their code - an apparent violation of 'fair use' provisions of copyright law.
The rest of the license is pretty straightforward with nothing that's too objectionable that I can see immediately. I won't bother going through it in detail.
That said, nothing I can see appears to restrict someone who has accepted their license from answering explicit questions we might have, so long as they are not doing so for hire (thus 'commercially'), and so long as they don't distribute source code. A fair bit of useful knowledge might be gained in that way, albeit slowly.
Anyhow, a useful link for anyone interested in more background on some of the legal issues is: http://www.richmond.edu/~jolt/v1i1/liberman.html
Take care, -Gav