> Can't use it for commercial, non-profit, or revenue-generating activities? Uh, this actually seems insane to me? What is it for then?
Its a public preview, for which Microsoft probably does not wish to accept non-disclaimable liabilities for defects when used in those circumstances.
It is for previewing. By people who are interested in what is in the pipeline for a more general release.
> non-disclaimable liabilities
So you are saying that MIT/ISC/GPL/Apache2 and all the other OSS licenses do open you up to liabilites?
I am saying being a merchant in the field of software and supply software opens you up to liabilities, and saying “Not my responsibility” does not, in most jurisdictions, actially completely shield you from all of them, correct.
This may also, to a lesser extent, be true of people who are not merchants in the field of the product supplied.
It’s not the license creating the liability, in either case.
So you are saying that the parts of for example MIT or similar licenses that in clear terms say:
"THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE."
do not constitute something that frees you from those liabilities?
Cause if so I think basically most of open-source would just shut down tomorrow.
I'm with you on this one. Consider all the GPL'ed software that IBM distributes via Red Hat.
This doesn't make sense to me. They could just say the software is provided as-is and Microsoft holds no liability. Which they do say elsewhere. This license goes much farther to say Microsoft can sue you if you use it.
> This doesn't make sense to me. They could just say the software is provided as-is and Microsoft holds no liability.
You cannot effectively disclaim certain liability for uses of a product you supply, even with an as-is presentation (exactly what liability depends on jurisdiction and often other context). Merely claiming to have no liability does not make it so (what it will usually do is disclaim all yhe liability you can disclaim, except for particular liabilities that may require separate explicit specific waivers to be effective.)
OTOH, if the product you provide is a software license that doesn't cover specific uses, using the software for the excluded uses may not be seen as a use of the product provided at all, and may not trigger the non-disclaimable liabilities, and even it doesn't avoid those liabilities, in the event someone sues over them, it also enabled the product supplier to countersue for infringement damages and mitigate the liabilities.