The tech team, rb2 and Patmst3r, worked hard in getting NEM into a docker for Azure. In case some of you who may not know Azure, it is a Microsoft cloud computing platform and infrastructure. Recently, some months ago, Microsoft opened up Azure for crypto projects to place their solutions there in the cloud repository so that testers are able to download and testbed these initiatives from one location.

We spent a considerable amount of time getting this done. Unfortunately, at the last stage of our submission we were shown the agreement. In the agreement, to put our solution up there, requires us to give away all our rights. This is not quite palatable.

This article has been pretty explicit:

http://bitcoinist.net/microsoft-bullies-open-source-is-the-blockchain-their-next-target/

The agreement which is publicly available for us to peruse by Microsoft, confirms it:

http://windowsazure.github.io/docs/Contribution License Agreement.pdf

Having given it due consideration and thoughts, we have decided that NEM should be independent. Instead, we are proposing to still put it on Azure as a docker but we pay for it. By paying for it, we are assuming to be a customer of MS instead. In doing so, we are free from losing our rights as well as still prove that we are able to put it on the Azure cloud and allow testers to work on our solution without NEM losing any rights at all.

In short, putting the NEM docker on Azure, in our opinion, is nothing more than making it simpler to install, vis-à-vis via Github. Putting it on Azure also extends our solution to making it available to people who are familiar with the MS service platform.

NEM does not believe that it should lose its rights to anyone, not in the very spirit of how crypto projects are founded upon.

On that basis, NEM would like to announce that it has no intention to get itself listed in Azure for free like the rest of the other projects, unless MS waives that agreement, for which if they are sincere, they should. Instead NEM will investigate a paid addition to Azure, achieving the same goal for a cost but keeping our full rights.