Microsoft, OSI Discuss Shared Source Licenses

linumax writes "While Microsoft Corp. has publicly said it has no immediate plans to submit its newest Shared Source licenses to the Open Source Initiative for approval, the company met with the OSI board this week to discuss the matter. Ronald Mann, a law professor at the University of Texas in Austin, said two of the new licenses, the Microsoft Permissive License, which is modeled on the existing BSD license, and the Microsoft Community License, based on the Mozilla Public License, appeared to satisfy the Open Source Definition administered by the OSI."

Danese Cooper's blog entry

[Russ Nelson]

Danese Cooper's blog entry [blogs.com] is our official statement on this matter.
-russ

Tim O'Reilly's Thoughts on the Matter

[theGreater]

O'Reilly Radar Entry [oreilly.com]
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/10/new_sour ce_licenses_from_micro.html [oreilly.com]

-theGreater.

Re:Oh?

[Russ Nelson]

That's just not going to happen. We need to defend the trademark that we license to people whose software is using an approved license. In order to do that, we can't let people use the trademark without approval. If we were to withdraw approval (NOT a possibility!) we would end up with people innocently misusing the trademark. It wouldn't be their fault; it would be our fault. We would be diluting our own trademark. Not a happy-making situation to be in, so we're not going to withdraw approval.

Instead, the current plan is to provide advice to developers when they want to pick a license. I expect that we will have three lists: Recommended, Recommended Specialty, and Not Recommended. Typical possible ranking: Recommended: GPL, Recommended Specialty: NOSA, Not Recommended: any license of the form "Copyright (C) Foo Bar, Inc., purveyors of find liquor-vending software."

Re:Has Microsoft learned something?

[arkanes]

IBM has contribued a signifigant amount of code to the Linux kernel, thats all under the GPL. They've contributed to several other projects, that code is under the license of the project its donated to. They've open sourced several projects whole sale, although I'm not sure how many if any of those are under the GPL (but they are under OSI approved OSS licenses). IBM is one of the major contributors to Eclipse.

See http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/views/openso urce/projects.jsp [ibm.com] for a list of some of the projects they're actively involved with. This list doesn't seem to include projects that they have released to the community, such as Cloudscape.

Re:Has Microsoft learned something?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's true, Microsoft uses the GPL

http://www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,27511,00 .html [thestandard.com]

Their "tools for Unix" is under the GPL. Interix and other migration tools are under the GPL, the intent is to make it easy to move to Microsoft products. I believe they got the idea from DCon Roach motels.