Lawrence Rosen, a partner in the law firm Rosenlaw & Einschlag and
author of "Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual
Property Law," said he has "explained to Microsoft that their license
is expressly incompatible with the warranty of provenance in the
Academic Free License and the Open Software License."
Specifically, he said, "the 'nontransferable, non-sublicenseable'
language in their reciprocal patent license imposes an impossible
administrative burden on the open-source development community and,
in essence, creates additional downstream patent licenses that will
be incompatible with the AFL/OSL and similar open-source licenses,
and with the open-source development process."
Rosen added that some issues go beyond just open-source concerns.
"The requirement that 'If you would like a license from Microsoft
(e.g., rebrand, redistribute), you need to contact Microsoft
directly' gives Microsoft information about its competitors' plans
that it has no reason to know."
In addition, he said, "No open-source license—and all of them allow
rebranding and distribution—can be conditioned on informing Microsoft
of anything at all. Other proposed licenses have been rejected by OSI
[Open Source Initiative] and FSF [Free Software Foundation] because
they required licensees to notify the licensor of their intentions."