After years of hostility towards Free Software Foundation (FSF) licensing (here and here) Microsoft has announced the first in a series of PHP patches - and it's using an FSF license.

Open-source software veteran Paula Hunter has one of the more interesting jobs in the industry, as the executive director of the CodePlex Foundation, a non-profit, open-source organization that was established with Microsoft as its founding sponsor.

Microsoft's Web Sandbox Live Labs project is now available under an open source license. Microsoft chose the Apache 2.0 license for the project, but pointed out that the project will not become an Apache project, although the vendor has been a member of the Apache Software Foundation since July 2008.

Microsoft announced on Friday that it would be joining the Apache Software Foundation, one of the leading organizations in the open-source world. Microsoft became a platinum sponsor of the ASF, which costs $100,000/year and is the highest level of sponsorship that the foundation offers.

The CodePlex Foundation is a non-profit designed to encourage and educate commercial software developers to start or improve their own open source projects. And, even though Microsoft is the first sponsor of the Foundation, all of the projects are "platform and technology agnostic," Hunter emphasized in a recent interview.

Google’s WebM, an open and royalty-free media format based on the VP8 video codec, was amongst the highlights coming out of Google I/O 2010. After examining the software license, open source pundits questioned whether WebM should, in theory, be classified open source software.

Last April (April-29-2010) there was a local event in Ecuador organized by AESoft, the Ecuadorian Software association. This event was names “Integrated Technologies” and was sponsored by Microsoft, CodePlex, Port25 and The Apache Foundation. On this conference Microsoft sent a message saying that they are Open Source friendly and they support Open Source development.

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.

One common misconception about open source software is that it can be changed by anyone and is less secure; however, most open source is strictly governed. For example, the Apache Software Foundation has tight configuration management controls for developers. Its products are so good that most major software vendors include some Apache software in their products including Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and Sun.