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The Open Source Initiative has approved two of Microsoft's licenses. This is important because it gives them legitimacy in the open source community. The licenses were formally known as the Microsoft Permissive License and the Microsoft Community License. They have now been renamed, respectively to:
The OSI stated that the "decision to approve was informed by the overwhelming (though not unanimous) consensus from the open source community....Microsoft didn't ask for special treatment, and didn't receive any."
If you have never read the licenses before, you are likely to find them refreshingly easy to understand. For instance, here are the rights granted in a key passage from the Public License:
It is not quite plain English, but it is admirably close to that estimable, if frequently elusive, standard. The rest of the license is short, and generally easy to understand.
The OSI is worth a few moments of study. It has, for instance, produced a definition of the distribution terms for open source software. That document is called The Open Source Definition and includes the following:
As you can see, the OSI actually does write documents in plain English, an achievement which is always worthy of respect. Overall, the acceptance of Microsoft's licenses by the OSI is good news for Microsoft developers and the software community in general.
Anonymous
October 23, 2007
Did you see this post at blogs.msdn.com
Anonymous
October 23, 2007
Great news! I'm new here--and couldn't find any software that is currently using this license. Could you point out some examples?
Anonymous
November 04, 2007
You can find software that uses this license on CodePlex:
http://codeplex.com/
Since this license used to be called the Permissive License, you might find that name used frequently.
Anonymous
November 04, 2007
Welcome to the thirty-fifth edition of Community Convergence. This week we have an interview with C#
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