Microsoft seeks OSI's approval of Shared Source

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Jul. 27, 2007

Microsoft says it will submit one or more of its Shared Source licenses to the Open Source Initiative (OSI) for review and approval as open source licenses. The move represents a major shift in strategy for the company, which has previously refused to seek any such approval.

The announcement was made by Bill Hilf, general manager of platform strategy at Microsoft, in a July 26 keynote at the annual O'Reilly Open Source Conference. "Microsoft and the OSI are currently in active discussion on this, and additional details will be made available in the coming weeks," Hilf said.

When asked by eWEEK what had changed to make this the right time for Microsoft to seek OSI approval, a Microsoft spokesperson declined to give specifics, but noted that "things continue to evolve when it comes to open source at Microsoft."

In conjunction with Hilf's keynote, Microsoft has created a new Web site, Open Source at Microsoft. This "new web property clearly outlines Microsoft's position on open source software (OSS) by providing specific information about Microsoft, the OSS community, and the interaction between the two," according to Hilf.

Microsoft has not specified which of its shared source licenses it will submit to the OSI for approval. Currently there are three main licenses:

The Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL)
Microsoft Community License (Ms-CL)
Microsoft Reference License (Ms-RL)

Interestingly, the Microsoft Community License was submitted to the OSI for approval last year. However, as eWEEK notes, it wasn't Microsoft who submitted it; it was submitted by John Cowan, a programmer and blogger in New York.

In his submission email, Cowan wrote: "I believe that this license should be approved by OSI even though it is basically similar to more widely used weak-reciprocal licenses, because it is better to encourage Microsoft in particular to release under an OSI-approved license than not. I think it very unlikely that they will go back and adopt some existing license."

Hilf told eWEEK at that time that while the company did not have a problem with one of its licenses being OSI approved, the challenge was that the OSI had previously positioned itself as anti-Microsoft. Perhaps the OSI has now softened its stance.

"If the licenses are approved, it should give the community additional confidence that the code we're sharing is truly Open Source," Jon Rosenberg, Microsoft's director of source programs, wrote this week on the company's "Port 25" blog.

"The same voices that have been calling for Microsoft products to better interoperate with open source products would voice their approval should the Open Source Initiative itself open up to more of the IT industry," added Rosenberg.

The complete eWEEK story is available here.

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