BashLogic http://jan.wildeboer.net/2011/02/microsoft-absolutely-no-free-software-for-windows-phone-and-xbox-apps/
Joe I'm speechless. (I'm also listening to this song while reading the blog post, which makes it even more dramatic :P).
Ayman Thats sad to hear actually, btw rahmu I love this track from LOTR, it really suits this thread lol
saeidw What Microsoft is really excluding is not open source or even just the GPL. They're excluding Copyleft licenses. Any license that says that the software must be distributed under that same license is a copyleft license. I actually think Microsoft made a sound decision on that one... sort of. A strong copyleft puts the burden of providing sources on the distributor. This means that for every application under a strong copyleft, Microsoft would have to make sure that sources are distributed either with the application or made available through some Microsoft repository. They just didn't want to have to deal with that and so they excluded copyleft. Licenses that don't have a copyleft clause such as the BSD and MIT licenses are still allowed, and they're definitely "open source" licenses. The GPL was explicitly designed to stop vendors of proprietary software from making use of free software without contributing something back. I say that this is more a success for the GPL than a failure of Microsoft. The GPL is doing what it was designed to do. Microsoft is just making sure they don't violate the GPL by including free software and being unable to comply with the license.