Katana Lifts Its License - Katana v2 nuget bins will not be restricted to Windows only...

CodeBetter - Howard Dierking - Katana License Lifts Windows-only Restriction

Over the past few months, a great deal of attention has been paid to the following clause used in most of the licenses associated with the NuGet packages that we and other teams at Microsoft ship.

“ a. Distribution Restrictions. You may not … distribute Distributable Code to run on a platform other than the Windows platform;”

In the case of the ASP.NET-related projects, including project Katana, this license (and the associated restriction) does not apply to the source code, but rather to the compiled binaries that are distributed via NuGet (the Katana source code is released under the Apache 2.0 license). This means that even today, it is perfectly reasonable to build the source code yourself and run it on Mono on whatever platform you choose.

As Microsoft teams continue to take more and more components out of the traditional box products and deliver them as NuGet packages, the frustration over this restriction has grown proportionally. ...

So we changed the license.

With the release of Katana 2.0, which will accompany Visual Studio 2013, the Windows-only restriction will be removed from the Katana binary license. It’s important to note here that at this point, the exception applies only to the Katana packages.

While it may appear to be a small step, we’re very excited as we believe it to be a significant one in the right direction!

As I said in my last post, this isn't the Microsoft we grew up with, is it? Nice to see the team respond to this concern and to take steps, no matter how small, to make it "right."