Microsoft Corp. clarified its plans to seek open-source certification for its shared-source licenses on Wednesday, saying it will submit for approval only the two licenses that allow source code to be used on any platform.

t seems we’ve arrived upon Microsoft open source. In the last couple of years, whenever there was discussion of Microsoft’s open source projects and efforts such as CodePlex or Port25, there was typically the standard open source response: it’s not OSI-approved; it’s not real open source.

The Microsoft Permissive License, one of two licenses the software maker submitted to the Open Source Initiative for approval as open-source licenses in August, is unlikely to be approved in its current form.

Director of Source Program at Microsoft Corporation Jon Rosenberg submitted its Shared Source License called "Microsoft Community License" to Open Source Initiative for considering it as an OSI approved Open Source License.

This was the body of an email message sent to the Open Source Initiative (OSI) license-discuss email list less than two hours after the third version of the GNU General Public License (GPLv3) was officially announced by the Free Software Foundation (FSF): "I submit the following licenses for consideration by the OSI for inclusion in the list of licenses complying with the OSD."

Open Source Initiative board member, Simon Phipps, declared on Monday that Google’s WebM project “is not currently open source”. It was a statement based on the fact that the license used for WebM is not currently approved by the Open Source Initiative as being compliant with the Open Source Definition.

Michael Tiemann, president of the Open Source Initiative (and Red Hat's VP of Open Source Affairs), has decided to stand up against the flagrant abuse of the term "open source" (by companies like SugarCRM, CentricCRM, and MuleSource, and OpenBravo, to shame a few). He is urging the community to use "open source" only to refer to OSI-approved licenses.

"The Open Source initiative has, to date, approved 73 licenses. How many do you really need? If you're a company or individual producing Open Source software, no more than 4. And you can get along with just 2 of them."

Badgeware puts open source on a slippery slope to the approval of ever-more restrictive licenses. The OSI - the body that ratifies all open source and Linux licenses - has failed to establish a clear guideline for approving badgeware, and apparently acted arbitrarily, leaving left us potentially open to even more badgeware.