You can look but you better not touch

You may read the license language here, or just read this from guest analyst Mr. Bruce Springsteen:

 I came home from work and I switched on Channel 5 There was a pretty little girly lookin' straight into my eyes Well I watched as she wiggled back and forth across the screen She didn't get me excited she just made me feel mean

Yes, The Boss has been an astute tech analyst even longer than John Dvorak.

The lyric neatly sums up the attitude of the open source community to the Microsoft announcement. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols calls it "an open source trap." Dave Rosenberg calls it "a patent trolling dream." William Hurley says Microsoft is going "open source," and those quote marks are his point.

It is, as all these esteemed analysts note, a way of putting developers on notice that if anything they write (for, say Mono) looks anything like what's in the .Net Framework, Microsoft's lawyers will go all RIAA on their epidermis.

Or, as The Boss wrote in his column, "mess around, you'll wind up in Dutch boy, you can look but you better not, no no you better not, no you better not touch." (Blow Big Man.) A new collection of Springsteen's blog posts is now available from Amazon.Com.

Next week, I hope to get Miley Cyrus in to analyze the Novell deal.