Joe Wilcox at Microsoft Monitor has a series of three posts on Microsoft’s RSS Platform. (Part 2 is here and Part 3 is here.) They’re well worth reading, with some interesting insights and a nice historical overview. It’s too bad the first post in the series starts with a big mistake:
Microsoft will introduce proprietary tags to RSS, which it will make available under a Creative Commons license.
Proprietary means the format is owned by one company, and if anyone wants to use it they have to pay a royalty, or reverse-engineer it, or reinvent the wheel. These extensions are being released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, whose terms read:
You are free:
- to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work
- to make derivative works
- to make commercial use of the work
The extensions Microsoft announced today are not “proprietary.” Exactly the opposite, in fact.
Where do you see that they are using Attribution ShareAlike? I can’t find a refernce to that.
Follow the link in Larry Lessig’s blog. Also, see the official specs from Microsoft, published here. The license info appears at the bottom of the page.
First Microsoft start some projects over at Sourceforge, and now they publish a standard under a Creative Commons license. Honestly, what is the world coming to?