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Date: Thu, 08 Mar 2001 17:53:08 +0000
To: "James A. Sutherland" <jas88@cam.ac.uk>
From: Anton Altaparmakov <aia21@cam.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: Microsoft begining to open source Windows 2000?
Cc: Venkatesh Ramamurthy <Venkateshr@ami.com>, <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
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At 17:36 08/03/2001, James A. Sutherland wrote:
>On Thu, 8 Mar 2001, Anton Altaparmakov wrote:
> > At 16:04 08/03/01, Venkatesh Ramamurthy wrote:
> > It is a "look but don't touch" license which is as far away from the ideas
> > of the GPL as you can possibly get.
>
>Is it? Going from "totally closed" to "we might let you see the code if
>you grovel" is a step in the right direction, at least.

It would be except there is no big change. Microsoft was already doing 
that, as you say below yourself, except that it is now broadening the 
number of people that are allowed to see the code.

> > Even submitting them a patch is technically violating their license as a
> > patch implies that you have modified their code already, which is 
> forbidden!
>
>Hmm... Perhaps. I doubt they'd object, particularly if the patch worked :P

Well, there is that of course. But if they wanted to, they could shoot you 
down for it in accordance with the license.

> > The only change from before that I can see is that Microsoft is going to
> > make even more money now, because they will collect the money from ~1000
> > instead of ~10 people. No other news there.
>
>They do already license the source to a few trusted companies (Executive
>Software used to ship modified NTFS drivers for NT 3.51 as part of
>Diskeeper, IIRC). They are inching ever so slowly towards letting human
>beings (cf MS drones) read their code...

Exactly my point. Only a slight change in numbers, nothing more, nothing less.

Anton


-- 
Anton Altaparmakov <aia21 at cam.ac.uk> (replace at with @)
Linux NTFS Maintainer / WWW: http://sourceforge.net/projects/linux-ntfs/
ICQ: 8561279 / WWW: http://www-stu.christs.cam.ac.uk/~aia21/

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