First, keep in mind, the provisional board of the CodePlex Foundation is only half Microsoft, and they have a mandate to setup a new board within a certain time frame.
Second, they've also said the default license will actually be the Modified BSD license, so none of that untrusted MS-PL stuff going on.
Thirdly, I've caught word from the inside that one of the effects this could have will be Microsoft employees being allowed to use open-source software internally, along with the ability to contribute to said projects under this CodePlex Foundation. With current issues like Microsoft programmers not being allowed to use superior open-source tools over inferior Microsoft ones (for example, Entity Framework versus NHibernate) - this will definitely result in Microsoft's own position changing for the better.
