Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 18th Nov 2008 06:45 UTC, submitted by pablo_marx
Microsoft has released an initial release of version 2.0 of the Singularity operating system (research development kit, as it likes to call it). Singularity is a microkernel research operating system, where the kernel, drivers, and applications are all written in managed code. Singularity is released under a shared source academic license, and you can do whatever you want with it, except making money (simply put).
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Member since:
2006-02-05
Actually, both you and Thom are wrong.
the MS-RL is not their open source license, the MS-PL is. The MS-PL has no restrictions on it, and is OSI certified as open source (which is the only real, legal way to say something is open source)
The whole "black helicopters" reasoning you are giving is wrong too. MS-RL are for things specifically getting released for academic purposes. Before the MS-RL, MS would share source code with universities around projects like this, just with all sorts of NDAs.
Same deal with project ROTOR, they put a lot of time and money into an internal research project which was intended to explore ideas that may give their own products a competitive advantage in the future. They don't mind sharing their toys, but at the same time don't want other companies to benefit from their beefy R&D budget.