Michael Dolan Dot Com

Wednesday, March 12th, 2008

The SFLC publishes an analysis of Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise

The analysis document can be downloaded here: http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2008/osp-gpl.html

Nonprofit Group Says Microsoft Promise Provides No Assurance for Developers

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), provider of pro-bono legal services to protect and advance free and open source software, today published a paper that considers the legal implications of Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise (OSP) and explains why it should not be relied upon by developers concerned about patent risk.

Now this Microsoft response is just ridiculous:

“Because the General Public License (GPL) is not universally interpreted the same way by everyone, we can’t give anyone a legal opinion about how our language relates to the GPL or other OSS licenses, but based on feedback from the open source community we believe that a broad audience of developers can implement the specification(s).”