Quoting the Microsoft Service Agreement (which seems to be obligatory for those using Windows Live applications):
4. How You May Not Use the Service.
In using the service, you may not:
use the service in a way that harms us or our affiliates, resellers, distributors, and/or vendors (collectively, the "Microsoft parties"), or any customer of a Microsoft party;
Unless there’s a more precise definition of "use in a way that harms", that just won’t work.
Is it "harm" if I merely work on some project (commercial or in my spare time, open source or not - doesn’t matter) that interferes with the business of such an affiliate etc.?
I guess Phoenix - one of the big guys in PC BIOS development - might be somewhere in that list - their software interacts in some way with Windows, and they probably coordinate their efforts.
Phoenix probably don’t like linuxbios too much - oops, I worked on that, and used e-mail while doing so. Would this clause prevent me from legally reading and sending linuxbios mails with Windows Live Mail?
I finally got a response to my inquiry about the Qt licensing exceptions for opensource licenses. I doesn’t look confidential, so here it is:
We will try to add the CDDL, but it may need to wait for a later
release. The next package is already going through testing, so I think
it may be too late to add it, but we will try.
I’m not sure how adding a license affects testing a release, but that’s their business. It still sounds great! Thank you, all the people at Trolltech for a wonderful c++ development library and supportive licensing behaviour!
Yay for GNU Freedom. Recently I ran over a discussion where there were some concerns about the viability of using "binary blobs" in an implementation of the AES algorithm.
Sure, there’s a table in it, 256 elements wide, with some weird numbers in it. What is that table? It’s an S-Box, one of the central pieces of every algorithm that’s based on the Feistel cipher. AES is such an algorithm.
When looking in the the spec (FIPS-197), you can see (on page 16) that they’re defined just like that: a table of values to use. Where do this numbers come from? Probably some NSA office, where some mad scientist (just like you’d image, probably) took the hints from page 26 of the proposal (or not) and shuffled a box with 256 numbers, and carefully placed them in a 16x16 square (think of lottery)…
Seriously, those guys tend to know things about crypto that they prefer to not talk about. And they knew 1975, 15 years before the rest of the world figured it out, that random placement of those numbers in that square is not a good idea, as proved by their work on DES.
So please, those numbers are necessary, and they’re necessarily in this order (as otherwise you’d get a different algorithm), and they very likely in exactly that layout for a good reason. Reading up on crypto algorithms even tells you what to do with them, and the current form and shape of such arrays is more than enough for modification…
But why would you want to modify it?
Trolltech decided to give more Open Source projects the possibility to use their fine Qt library - Unfortunately they seem to have forgot about the CDDL (but the MPL is in there).
I asked them for their reasons, probably they just didn’t realize that the CDDL would be a fine addition. Let’s see when/if they answer…
