This document has been written in an attempt to review and contrast the samples of licenses made available by Microsoft and the Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) community. As these two have now become the most prominent purveyors of platforms and software application technology in the computer industry worldwide, we feel it would be instructive for business and organisational users to have a plain-language analysis of these key components of the software they use. We will also attempt a very simple quantitative analysis of what portions of both licenses devote to giving users rights, taking away user rights, and limiting the extent to which users can make legal claims or sue the purveyors of the software from both camps.

The Microsoft Windows XP Professional End User License Agreement (the EULA hereafter) was selected as representative of the current-generation license provided by Microsoft for business-grade systems. The GNU General Public License (the GPL hereafter) has been selected as the most commonly-used Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) license. The GPL is used by well-known platforms and software technology such as Linux, GNOME, KDE, OpenOffice.org and MySQL. While much of what we will cover may be known to some readers, we believe that there is widespread ignorance of both the EULA and the GPL. We will thus make every effort to provide a clear, simplified analysis of both, to assist in the better understanding of these licenses which are very important to all users of computers.

Download pdf A Comparison of the GPL and the Microsoft EULA