Re: Campaign for position of chair and mandate to close this community group

On 15/01/14 16:42, Rüdiger Sonderfeld wrote:
> I just looked up the licensing terms on Microsoft's PlayReady website and it 
> explicitly states
> 
> 3.1 (a) of the PlayReady Master License agreement
> 
> | The licenses granted in the PlayReady License(s) do not include the
> | right to, and Company shall not, distribute the Licensed Technology
> | (or derivative works thereof, including De veloped Technology) in any
> | manner that would ca use any Licensed Technology component to become
> | subject to any of the terms of an Excluded License.  An “Excluded
> | License” means any version of the GNU General Public License (GPL), Le
> | sser/Library GPL (LGPL), Mo zilla Public License (MPL), Comm on Public
> | License (CPL), Affero GPL (AGPL) or any other li cense for software
> | where the license include s terms providing that (a) a licensee of th
> | e software is authorized to make modificati ons to, or derivative
> | works of, the source code for the software, and (b) the licensee is
> | authorized to distribute such modifications or derivative works of the
> | software only if recipients are authorized to receive th e source code
> | for, modify or make further derivativ e works of licensee’s
> | modifications or deri vative works. For purposes of this clause ,
> | “distribute” includes providing access to the functi onality of the
> | code through a computer network”.
> 
> The license explicitly says that PlayReady can not be used with any copyleft 
> license.  It is also noteworthy that the Mozilla Public License (MPL) is also 
> excluded thus preventing one major browser vendor from using this technology.

Purely on the licensing question (because that's my area): that does not
say that PlayReady cannot be used with code under such licenses, it says
that it may not be used in such a way as to cause PlayReady itself to
fall under such a license. For something like the GPL, if you want to
ship PlayReady in your app, those two things are approximately the same,
but for a license with a lesser copyleft scope, such as the MPL, they
are very much not the same.

Gerv

Received on Wednesday, 15 January 2014 17:44:16 UTC