The Butt Ugly Weblog

Microsoft does copyleft?

So, Microsoft told everyone that IE7 is going to include built-in RSS recognition and that mythical beast, Longhorn, is going to have RSS support built-in. That is good, and it's about time.

But get this: I'm looking at their RSS extensions and realize that they are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license! That is a viral copyleft license, i.e. if you make any modifications to it, you must share it also under a Attribution-Sharealike -license.

And this from the company which has consistently attacked the GNU GPL, the most known viral copyleft license.

Microsoft is a huge company, and the actions of a small part of it of course don't change the direction the entire company is taking, but at least someone inside there is trying. It's a small step, but it's a good step. Companies such as IBM have already realized that the "commons" field (including open source software) is a field that they can play in, and gain something from it - it's nice to see that even the slower corporate behemoths are opening up a bit. Including Nokia.

(Note: Looking for references, I also realized that Larry Lessig has also written about this.)