Thanks for this!
This would be such a huge “get” for Blender if we can work out the licensing issue. Fingers crossed!
there are licensing issues? i’m not really up on my legal jargon, so the Microsoft Public License kinda goes right over my head. what kind of licensing issues does it effect?
The MsPL is not GPL compatible.
Urg. Any way it could be forked and made GPL for the new fork?
Too much time has gone since SIGGRAPH without news so it is wiser to forget about it.
You know what word goes hand in hand with freedom? Loneliness.
I believe I’ve heard before that the Blender devs. can always implement it themselves by following the original paper about the subject.
It means that every part will have to be developed from scratch, but it also means that it’s not impossible for Blender to obtain a system like this.
Not likely. The more likely scenario is that some exception to the license gets made for Blender (or something along those lines). OpenSubdiv folks spoke with Ton at SIGGRAPH about it. AFAIK, the discussion continues, but once you start wrangling with legal departments in large companies, everything tends to take longer to bear fruit. Patience is about the best that we have right now.
Too much time has gone since SIGGRAPH without news so it is wiser to forget about it.
This would be too huge of an improvement to forget about. I would rather make noise to call attention to it so something might get done.
When it’s all boiled down, the only difference between the licenses seems to be that any code added or derived from must be governed by the original license, be it either GPL or MPL.
Cool. Suppose waiting a bit for the legal bods to bash things out is better than trying to implement this from scratch with lots of possible wasted time.
@rontarrant: the MsPL (note MsPL, not MPL which is the Mozilla Public License) has a clause which states that if you sue the copyright owner, you immediately loose the right to use the software and this clause is incompatible with the GPL.
About implementing it from scratch using articles information: the algorithm is covered by patents so you cannot do that.
Deciding a license waiver is not a thing that requires months to be done so it would have been done by now if Microsoft wanted. Thinking about it, why should Microsoft help the community which vows to destroy it? Sorry, but hate fosters hate, not cooperation.
I stand corrected.
I think it’s worth a collective apology to Microsoft if it means getting this technology into Blender.
If not, we just don’t admit we were involved in the hate mongering. 
Being part of an open source community does not mean that one wants to destroy Microsoft. That is an individual opinion and left for the single members of the community alone. Some hate Microsoft, some likes Microsoft and some is somewhere in the middle. Lots of people run Blender on Windows. My opinion is that these opinions should be left outside this discussion as they will do neither the discussion or the Blender community no good.