Alex Hudson wrote:
Correction: it's now published here -
http://www.microsoft.com/interop/msnovellcollab/newmoonlight.mspx
To my untrained eye, it seems to cover Moonlight fully, the termination
clause doesn't work retroactively, it includes coverage for the Mono
portions and it seems to apply for everyone - hopefully this is a good
thing. It seems to remove previous objections about Novell-only-ness.
This is still non-Free:
Microsoft, on behalf of itself and its Subsidiaries, hereby covenants
not
to sue End Users for infringement under Necessary Claims of Microsoft and
its Subsidiaries on account of such End Users’ use of Moonlight
Implementations to the extent originally provided by Novell during the
Term and, if applicable, the Extension or Post-Extension Period, but only
to the extent such Moonlight Implementations are used as Conforming
Runtimes.
[...]
“Conforming Runtime” means plug-in or other runtime functionality
hosted
by a Conforming Host for receiving and rendering, wholly within such
Conforming Host, media and interactive applications compatible with
Silverlight 3 or Silverlight 4.
[...]
“Moonlight Implementation” means only those specific portions of
Moonlight
3 or Moonlight 4 that run only as Conforming Runtimes within a Conforming
Host on a Personal Computer and are not licensed under GPLv3 or a Similar
License.
This appears to be a classical "The license only applies if you comply to
our standard" restriction, which is non-Free because it doesn't allow using
the code for a different purpose (nor to extend the standard, which is kinda
ironic coming from a company which keeps extending everyone ELSE's standards
with proprietary extensions).
As the patent license is non-Free, Moonlight still has to be considered non-
Free wherever software patents apply. So as far as I can tell, this is not
acceptable for Fedora, sorry. (But of course spot and/or RH Legal will have
the final word.)
Kevin Kofler