Hell froze over

While I was travelling earlier this month, on Aug. 10 Microsoft submitted two of its open source licenses for approval by the Open Source Initiative: the Microsoft Community License and the Microsoft Permissive License, which are identical except for a single clause.

On the open source license discussion e-mail list, the reaction to the licenses (particularly the MS-CL) was generally positive. Of course, approval under the OSI process is not a done deal.

Still, this is not something we would have expected 7 years ago when Microsoft introduced its first “shared source” plans as a response to the threat of open source. Within the open source community, I suspect there would be a split between those who welcome Microsoft as legitimating open source business models, and those suspicious of Microsoft as trying to undercut support for OSS with its own nefarious plans.

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