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Microsoft gets official open-source blessing from OSI for two of its licenses

Many times Microsoft has been barracked for its "anti-open source" stance, which quite frankly has never existed.  However, since we have always made software available under various licenses, it was decided that it was time to get these officially recognise by the people behind the dreaded GPL (that is my humour btw).  Not everyone is happy about it as can be read at http://robertogaloppini.net/2007/10/18/open-source-at-microsoft-microsofts-licenses-get-approved-by-osi/.  Microsoft's desire to protect what it considers to be its intellectual property is seen as a threat by some in the open source world.  However if you look at MSDN, it has, I suspect, millions of lines of code for people to borrow, use and then sell.  I would call that open source of one type as well as codezone for another.  In fact, as I have always understood it, Microsoft does not care how you develop or release you code, providing you do it legally!  I think Microsoft gets official open-source blessing from OSI for two of its licenses covers most points

Microsoft gets official open-source blessing from OSI for two of its licenses

By Ryan Paul | Published: October 16, 2007 - 01:41PM CT

The Open Source Initiative (OSI), the organization responsible for maintaining the definition of open source and evaluating open source licenses, has officially approved the Microsoft Community (Ms-CL) and Permissive (Ms-PL) licenses.

Microsoft submitted its Shared Source licenses shortly after announcing plans to do so at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention earlier this year. OSI president Michael Tiemann responded by pointing out that three of Microsoft's five Shared Source licenses impose restrictions that are clearly inconsistent with the Open Source definition, but acknowledged that the two licenses submitted by Microsoft had merit and would be evaluated.

"The decision to approve was informed by the overwhelming (though not unanimous) consensus from the open-source community that these licenses satisfied the 10 criteria of the Open Source definition, and should therefore be approved," said OSI in a statement. "Microsoft came to the OSI and submitted their licenses according to the published policies and procedures that dozens of other parties have followed over the years. Microsoft didn't ask for special treatment, and didn't receive any. In spite of recent negative interactions between Microsoft and the open-source community, the spirit of the dialog was constructive and we hope that carries forward to a constructive outcome as well."

 

ttfn

David

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Posted Tue, Oct 23 2007 1:34 AM by David Overton

Comments

Roberto Galoppini wrote re: Microsoft gets official open-source blessing from OSI for two of its licenses
on Tue, Oct 23 2007 11:07 AM

I am pretty happy that Microsoft's licenses have been approved, it was a very important step for Microsoft. And it is going to be more and more important as soon as CodePlex and similar initiatives will take place.

My guess is that, sooner or later, <a href="robertogaloppini.net/.../">Microsoft will seat on OSI board..</a>

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