[OT] MS EULA -- (will ActiveState become outlaws? ;-)

[Samuel Schulenburg]

I work for a company that has a license from Microsoft to use
Windows2000 as the OS for one of our products. As a result of the
licenseing agreement, I can not use Python on any of these products,
even for internal testing, as the company is worried that their is a
slim chance that a copy may get shipped with a unit. I can not write
software that links in any public domain libraries, i.e Zlib. This
means that I have to write my own compression routines. WHAT A WAIST
OF TIME!!!

Sam Schulenburg



Roeland Rengelink <r.b.rigilink at chello.nl> wrote in message news:<3B32F81F.259DBA46 at chello.nl>...
> "Steven D. Majewski" wrote:
> > 
> > Is this the next stage of Microsoft's war against Open Source ?
> > 
> > Discussion of this on SlashDot :
> > <http://slashdot.org/articles/01/06/21/1810258.shtml>
> > ( Right before the article on the Monty Python Action Figures! )
> > 
> > If this spreads to all of Microsoft's EULA's, will this make
> > ActiveState illegal ?  They don't specifically mention Python's
> > license, but they do mention Perl's ( and the "similar to any
> > of the following" clause would seem to include Python's. )
> > 
> > Does anyone know if this should be taken seriously ?
> > 
> > -- Steve Majewski
> > 
> > <http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdn-files/027/001/516/eula_mit.htm>
> 
> Ironically, NS under Linux refuses to display that ;)
> 
> > 
> 
> Well, as I see it the GPL licence is morally equivalent to
> 
> 1. This is raging commie stuff
> 2. You can't use raging commie stuff in conjunction with evil empire
> stuff
> 
> and this microsoft licence is morally equivalent to
> 
> 1. This is evil empire stuff
> 2. You can't use evil empire stuff in conjunction with raging commie
> stuff
> 
> For once the free software movement and microsoft seem to agree on
> something
> 
> More seriously, the lack of a definition of ''use'' under (ii), and the
> misleading definition of Potentially Viral Software gives the impression
> that this was written by their PR department, rather than their lawyers. 
> 
> But then, I know as little about law as I do about PR.
> 
> Roeland