[Fedora-legal-list] Fedora and MS-PL (Dynamic Language Runtime)

[saulgoode at flashingtwelve.brickfilms.com]

Thank you for the rapid response and for concisely representing my  
concern. I won't belabor your decision but I will admit that I am bit  
more skeptical about associating "common sense" with some of the  
rulings and dicta of U.S. copyright law. :)

I also thank you for the suggestion that I contact Michele Herman to  
discover Microsoft's understanding of the scope of their license;  
though I would consider that more in the nature of philosophical  
inquiry as it would seem the more legitimate concern would target the  
intent (or perhaps even the degree of caprice) of the copyright holder  
of any MS-PLed code in question.

Regards.


P.S. The link provided in reference #8 of my post was incorrect and  
should have been:

http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.pdf

If that does not work then the appropriate PDF can be found by  
visiting http://www.copyright.gov/circs .


Quoting Richard Fontana <rfontana at redhat.com>:

> On Sat, 05 Dec 2009 13:31:28 -0500
> saulgoode at flashingtwelve.brickfilms.com wrote:
>
>> I won't speculate as to whether it was the intent of the authors of
>> the Microsoft Public License to consider "mere aggregation" to be
>> excluded from the scope of their reciprocal terms and
>> conditions[14], but regardless of their intent it seems that lack of
>> an exception being explicitly provided within the license itself may
>> potentially lead to a court decision that inclusion of both MS-PLed
>> and GPLed software within a Fedora distribution constitutes
>> copyright infringement -- not because the terms of the GPL weren't
>> met, but that those of the MS-PL were not met.
>
> I think you're arguing that we should consider the possibility that the
> MS-PL is what I'll call a 'hyper-strong' copyleft license, with a
> copyleft scope broader than that traditionally assumed by consensus of
> GPL-licensing communities to apply to the GPL, extending to
> combinations that would not have any copyleft implications in a GPL
> context, if only because of the latter's 'mere aggregation' clause.[1]
> The particular concern you have is that the MS-PL intended copyleft
> scope could extend to whole compilations in the copyright law sense, as
> for example all the code in a Fedora .iso that happens to contain one
> package licensed under MS-PL.
>
> There are a number of reasons, largely involving common sense and
> cultural intuition, why I think it is *extremely* unlikely that such an
> interpretation was intended by Microsoft (or other licensors using the
> MS-PL or would be adopted by such licensors or by a court construing
> this license. The likelihood is so remote that I think we can safely
> ignore it. However, if the issue continues to concern you, you may wish
> to contact Microsoft to get clarification from the horse's mouth.
> (Michele Herman at Microsoft's outside counsel firm Woodcock Washburn
> might be the best contact.)
>
> - Richard
>
> [1]Although I think the historical evidence shows that Richard Stallman
> added the mere aggregation clause to proto-versions of the GPL so he
> would stop getting questions about whether it was okay to distribute
> GNU software and unrelated proprietary software on the same tape, an
> issue he seems to have thought should have been obvious.
>
> --
> Richard E. Fontana
> Open Source Licensing and Patent Counsel
> Red Hat, Inc.
>