Microsoft Submits Two Licenses for Open Source Approval

Microsoft has submitted two of its share source licenses to the Open Source Initiative licensing committee for approval as compliant with the Open Source Definition, following up on plans announced at the recent at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention.
Microsoft's source program director, Jon Rosenberg, submitted both the Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL) and Microsoft Community License (Ms-CL) for consideration as OSI-approved licenses on Friday.

According to the terms of the approval process, submitters must identify which existing open source licenses are most similar to the license being submitted, as well as compatibilities and incompatibilities with existing licenses.

Rosenberg duly noted that the Ms-PL "has similarities to terms in both the New BSD license and Apache 2.0 license. However, the new BSD license does not contain an explicit patent grant and only implicitly refers to trademark issues."

The Ms-CL, meanwhile, was described as most like the Mozilla Public License, with the differentiation that it is shorter and easier to understand. In particular, the Mozilla

http://www.cbronline.com/article_news.asp?guid=51FE49A8-8E99-4AC5-9ED8-DDE7FE976D83

 

I think Microsoft are merely doing this an an excuse to claim that they are trying to be more open source friendly.

I'm not holding my breath for anything amazing...

 

Actually I don't believe this is the case. Microsoft is changeing with the times. They have said that they would like to have there office suite online and have people pay just like they do with google's office suite. Times are changeing and Microsoft is just adapting with the times.