aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Friday, October 28, 2005

Praise for Microsoft

From Larry Lessig:

Last week, Microsoft made a major announcement that will benefit the ecology of free and open source software licenses significantly. As described here, Microsoft has abandoned a ton of licenses, focusing its efforts on just three core licenses. Two of these three licenses - the MS-Community License (MS-CL), and the MS-Permissive License (MS-PL) are technically “free” licenses under the FSF’s definition of free. The third MS-Reference License (MS-RL) is a view-only license, not quite free, but valuable nonetheless.

This is fantastic news, reinforcing an ecology of free licenses.