Open source to some extend, but their whole thing about these emojis is that they are 3d and animated. But the repo only contains png renders if the 3d models. So you arent able to modify or animate the 3d models directly.
Imo they released enough to call it “open source” and get good PR from it without actually giving the raw source files to the community (their competitors). I was not pleased with this when they announced it 2 years ago. Its still the same.
Reminder that Microsoft uses the MIT license because it lets them do separate proprietary releases. They do this with vscode and release proprietary extensions that only work with the proprietary version of vscode, like pylance.
It’s not all bad, but just be aware this is what they do.
I kinda doubt there’s going to be any outside contributions to this project, so any non-exclusive license would allow MS to rerelease this under a proprietary license - even the GPL. They own the copyright, so they can release it under as many licenses as they wish.
With software there’s way lower barrier to entry and way higher chance of having the patches accepted. With art… Good luck convincing MS that your version of the emoji is worth the hassle of losing the ability to just change the license at any moment.
Add comment