August 13th, 2007
Microsoft Shared Source licenses are now in OSI's hands
On August 9, Microsoft made good on its promise to submit its Shared Source licenses to the Open Source Initiative for consideration as certified open-source licenses.
Microsoft submitted two of its three Shared Source licenses for consideration: The Microsoft Permissive License (MS-PL) and Microsoft Community License (MS-CL). It did not submit the Microsoft Reference License (MS-RL).
According to Microsoft Port 25 blogger Jon Rosenberg:
“We’ve also provided the license approval committee with our analysis of how these new submissions contribute to the body of OSI approved licenses. In addition we’ve sent an e-mail to the license-discuss alias, describing the submission. We look forward to some lively discussion on license-discuss over the next week.”
I asked at the end of July why Microsoft might be seeking OSI approval now (after rejecting that idea a year ago). My ZDNet blogging colleague Dana Blankenhorn noted that SugarCRM (one of Microsoft’s interoperability partners) recently received OSI approval for its license. Blankenhorn believes the OSI intentionally is herding cats and attempting to corral all of them in the OSI pen, avoiding an open-source licensing war.
Do developers care whether Microsoft’s Shared Source licenses are OSI-approved? To customers?
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