Talk:Shared source
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Many projects under Microsoft's Shared Source initiative allow free modification and redistribution. Most statements on the page seem uninformed or biased blanket statements.
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[edit] Incorrect
"Shared Source" is fully "Open Source" given the argument that's being made, the correct term would be "Free (as in freedom) software" i.e; It's Open Source but not Free Software because of critical restrictions.
- Huh? Did you read Open source vs. free software? The free software and open source terms are more-or-less equivalent. Also, "Shared Source" is not a specific license, and licenses under "Shared Source" are usually neither free software nor open source. I tweaked the final remark about Free Software categorisation a bit. --Erik 15:16, 7 November 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Not a license
First of all, the biggest problem with this article is that Shared Source initiative is not a particular license. It covers many seperate programs with a bunch of different licenses, some being extremely restrictive and others meeting the standards of the Open Source Initiative. Sweeping changes are in order? I know I'm a newb but if I screw up free feel to undo what I did. But I figure any work on this page is an improvement so I'll give it a shot. -- Foofy 17:52, 31 August 2005 (UTC)
- Hey, I cleaned up things quite a bit, at least made it not look like frantic anti-MS babling, but I'm really not sure what to do about the Criticism section? Other license pages like GPL have long sections on that but I'm not sure if I should remove the points that don't make any sense? I should leave that to a pro, maybe. -- Foofy 00:54, 1 September 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Shared Source or shared source
All Microsoft's references to "Shared Source" capitalize both words, as well as news articles referring to it. I think we should spell it that way to be consistent.-- Foofy 02:47, 2 September 2005 (UTC)
Let's reach a consensus on this. Most news articles and discussions (outside of Wikipedia) call it Shared Source. While open source isn't capitalized, it's because it's not like a proper "product name" or like a proper noun. Shared Source is a very specific licensing program from Microsoft, and until it is used otherwise by others, I think it should be capitalized. -- Foofy 13:33, 2 September 2005 (UTC)
- Agreed, for what it's worth --Zootm 23:47, 12 September 2005 (UTC)
- Thanks. After reading a bit more I'm beginning to see "shared source" turn up as a general term and other companies are using similar licenses. So I guess it probably makes sense to capitalize if it's referring to the program, lowercase if it's just the general idea of "shared source." I'll edit to reflect this. Also I'll finish up the NPOV bits today. Foofy 11:04, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Criticism links
I'm gonna go ahead and remove these, no other article on licensing has such commentary links, and if Wikipedia was to link to every individual opinion on every topic, things would get messy pretty quick. Revert if you think I'm in error. Foofy 16:58, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
[edit] About criticism
Now that people are starting to edit this page again, I thought I'd bring this up. The reason a lot of the criticism in the article was removed is because it was biased and outside of the criticism section, and because a great deal of the criticism was invalid and made claims that were not true (misunderstanding of what Shared Source is, etc.). -- Foofy 01:30, 18 October 2005 (UTC)
It's unclear to me how part of this line is justified: "Free software enthusiasts see shared source licenses as being equal to, if not worse than, proprietary licenses." I understand the use of "equal to" (the following quotes by prominent figures back that up) but the "if not worse than" seems a bit odd, considering the standpoint of "free software enthusiasts" is often characterized as being that software is either Free or Not Free. So a Shared Source license is Not Free, and not in some unspecified way Worse Than Not Free simply because it is connected to Microsoft. In fact, Shared Source offers at least one of the FSF's four freedoms (study) so, numerically, it's more free than closed source which has none of the four. --67.185.189.61
[edit] Free Software shared source licenses exist
It should be noted that, according to FSF Europe, two of Microsoft's Shared Source licenses seem to be Free Software licenses. Press release here. It seems to me that mainly template-like software use these licenses. --Erik 17:55, 24 November 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Blogger submits Shared Source license to OSI
Probably should go in the article, just not sure where yet. Foofy 14:47, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
[edit] IP Taint
Another concern is that viewing Shared Source may "taint" a developer with knowledge of licensed code, preventing participation in other projects where such code may be inadvertently used in violation of the shared source license. [1]
I removed this section from criticisms because it was incorrectly applied. If you read the article it has to do with how Microsoft if they open sourced Windows they would have to deal with taint internally. Not from Shared Source developers dealing with IP taint in their companies products. PPGMD 20:05, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
