Open Source Initiative News & Articles

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 has officially approved a pair of shared source licenses Microsoft recently submitted. This means the licenses in question are officially open source.

For those going, “Huh?” on account of the endless drama going down between Microsoft and the open source community, the OSI addresses that in a statement:

“In spite of recent negative interactions between Microsoft and the open source community, the spirit of the dialog was constructive and we hope that carries forward to a constructive outcome as well.”

The OSI acts as a kind of gatekeeper for Open Source Definition and its license review process. In July, the collective officially approved Socialtext’s Common Public Attribution License after nine months.

Formal evaluation of Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) and Microsoft Reciprocal License (Ms-RL) began in August.