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

[Richard Fontana]

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.