A few moths ago, Microsoft submitted the Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL) and the Microsoft Community License (Ms-CL) to the OSI for approval. Both have been approved, albeit with some modifications, including name changes for both. From the official announcement:

Acting on the advice of the License Approval Chair, the OSI Board today approved the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) and the Microsoft Reciprocal License (Ms-RL). 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.

The formal evaluation of these licenses began in August and the discussion of these licenses was vigourous and thorough. The community raised questions that Microsoft (and others) answered; they raised issues that, when germane to the licenses in question, Microsoft addressed. 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.

Some in the community wanted these licenses to be rejected solely on the fact that it was Microsoft that submitted them. While it’s easy to be mistrusting of MSFT, that would have been being petty for the sake of being petty and not at all in the spirit of the Open Source community. If you truly believe in choice and these licenses meet the OSD (and the OSI thinks they do), then it’s reasonable that they should be legitimate options, regardless of who came up with them. Russ has more to say in this blog post:

Of course, Microsoft is not widely trusted in the Open Source world, and their motives have been called into question during the approval discussions. How can they be attacking Open Source projects on one hand, and seeking not only to use open source methods, but use of the OSI Approved Open Source trademark? Nobody knows for sure except for Microsoft. But if you are confident that Open Source is the best way to develop software (as we at the Open Source Initiative are), then you can see why Microsoft would both attack Open Source and seek to use it at the same time. It is both their salvation and their enemy.

It should be interesting to see where Microsoft goes from here. This isn’t carte blanche for them to start claiming Open Source after all, as only code licensed under one of these two licenses qualifies as Open Source.

Additional coverage:
Matt Asay
Matthew Aslett

–jeremy

In what should come as no surprise, it looks like the discussion surrounding the Microsoft OSI submissions are getting a little cantankerous. From the article:

Another community member, Donovan Hawkins, doesn’t like the MS-PL’s requirement to keep its code separate from any other code licensed differently. “I can think of cases where I made MAJOR changes to some open-source function to use in a project,” he writes. “What sort of Frankenlicense would apply to that function if I wished to release my changes under GPL but the original was MPL or MSPL? Every other line of code under a different license?”

Hilf went on to say that one of the reasons Microsoft coined the term “Shared Source” was “to acknowledge that these licenses had not been approved by the OSI, and some of our Shared Source licenses will not be submitted to the OSI.” But, Hilf wrote, “I’m open to make this more distinguishable on where/how we post the [licenses] on the Web site, if it’s important to the community.”

I’d guess this is going to get even more heated from here. The OSI may end up stuck between a rock and a hard place on this one. On the one side, it’s easy to argue that the entity submitting an entry should not even come into play and that a license should be approved or disapproved solely on its merit. On the other hand, some people reason that approving a license from an entity whom it’s perceived is out to harm Open Source is enabling them to do so, and therefor should not be done. That may be a slippery slope to walk on though. We certainly don’t want Open Source to become “whatever the OSI wants”, but at the same time we do need to trust the OSI to steward the Open Source label in the way they see fit. That is going to get interesting…

You can view the entire discussion here.

–jeremy