The following is a sidebar accompanying an article published by Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm focused exclusively on Microsoft strategy & technology. Each month we make one or more key articles available to non-subscribers.
Microsoft's proposed extensions to RSS are being made available under a Creative Commons "Attribution-ShareAlike" license. Creative Commons is an organization founded by Stanford Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig and others to help bridge the gap between the "All Rights Reserved" licenses, typically used by commercial organizations, and placing a work in the public domain, which gives the creator no legal control over how the work is subsequently used (e.g., copied, modified, shared).
As part of its work, Creative Commons developed a series of 11 licensing templates that allow creators to mix and match various conditions they want to apply, such as whether or not they require users to give credit for the creator's work, or whether the work can be used for commercial purposes. A photographer might want to apply a license to her work that allows anyone to use the photographs for noncommercial purposes as long as the photographer is given credit.
The Attribution-ShareAlike license that Microsoft is using for its RSS extensions gives developers the right to use the technology for commercial or noncommercial work and to make derivative works, so long as Microsoft's contributions are properly acknowledged and any derivative works are distributed under the same license terms.
Previously Microsoft has used its own shared source licensing program to license access to its source code, such as Windows CE.
