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.

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.

The rumors are true. Microsoft (news, site) has an official open source license that was approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) — the Ms-PL, or Microsoft Public License. Since they have licensed their latest offering ASP.NET MVC 1.0 under the Ms-PL, we thought we would take a look at the license terms. Is there an evil catch somewhere in the terms and conditions?

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is the group that decides whether a software license merits a seal of approval as actual, genuine open source software. It has never been a secret group -- its license-discuss email list has always been open to all comers, for example -- but not many open source users or developers know who belongs to the board or what they do.

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."

I was disturbed today to read that Oracle will seek to relicense all OpenOffice code under the Apache-2.0 license and move OpenOffice into the Apache Software Foundation.

If you ever plan on writing an open source program, then you must make an important decision, selecting a program license. Generally for open source programs, there are two main licenses that most developers take into consideration. These licenses are the Gnu General Public License, and the BSD license.

"The Open Source Initiative has announced that the OSI Board has approved the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) and the Microsoft Reciprocal License (Ms-RL) as satisfying the criteria of the Open Source Definition, following their submission in August..."

Matt Asay writes that he can't understand why Microsoft's submission of its Microsoft Permissive License is not being welcomed by one and all with open arms at OSI. So I thought I'd try to explain it.