Star Microsoft To Open up Outlook .pst Format
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 26th Oct 2009 19:28 UTC, submitted by poundsmack
Microsoft Anyone who has ever dealt with Microsoft Outlook will know the .pst file format - it's the binary, undocumented file in which all data from Outlook is stored - emails, contacts, calendar, you name it, it's in there. Microsoft has announced that it will release detailed technical documentation on the Outlook .pst data format.
E-mail Print r 4   · Read More · 39 Comment(s) http://osne.ws/ha2
Thread beginning with comment 391537
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
RE[4]: Think twice
by Yama on Wed 28th Oct 2009 02:05 UTC in reply to "RE[3]: Think twice"
Yama
Member since:
2005-07-06

Version 2 of the GPL should be fine though, as long as you don't mind leaving yourself open to a potential patent suit on the part of MS.


Which means that is is not fine at all. Nobody wants to be at the mercy of a patent lawsuit. They are far more expensive and time consuming than most people or companies can afford.

You could purchase a licence, but that protects just you. Nobody else who uses the code is protected. Why is it GPL in the first place if nobody can use the code without being sued? That certainly removes the "freedom" from the concept of "Free(dom) Software".

Novell have an agreement like this with Microsoft regarding Mono and .NET patents. Novell and paying Novell customers are supposedly covered, but nobody else is. So if you use Mono in Ubuntu or Fedora for example, you are potentially liable.

Obviously, for GPL version 3 software this is a problems but surely for this kind of thing BSD would be just as good?


Licensing is a matter of choice for the originating developer(s). If you or they want to use code from elsewhere, it must be under a licence compatible to your/their own.

The fact is that most open source code out there is (L)GPL, and there are other licences compatible with it. You can't exclude most open source code and then claim that anyone can use the specs. Projects aren't going to change their licences simply to please Microsoft.

If you want an example of how to do this right, look at the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation deal with Microsoft, brokered by the SFLC and members of the Samba team:

http://samba.org/samba/PFIF/

They were very careful to ensure that all Free Software implementations would be covered, including GPLv3 ones like Samba.

So there's nothing impossible about this. It all can be done right.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 2