Microsoft’s general manager of platform strategy, Bill Hilf, announced the company’s intentions at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention last week but did not go into any detail about which licenses would be submitted or when.
The submission would not have significant implications for Microsoft’s software licensing given that the licenses involved have been in use since October 2005, but if the licenses were approved, it would enable Microsoft to claim to offer true open source software.
In a comment on Microsoft’s Port25 open source software lab blog, the company’s director of shared source programs, Jon Rosenberg, said the move should give the community additional confidence that the code we’re sharing is truly open source.
Our View
Microsoft has five shared source licenses, two of which would have the potential to be approved by the OSI. The Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL) is the least restrictive and could be thought of as the most like the BSD license in that it allows users to view, modify, and redistribute the source code for either commercial or non-commercial purposes.
The Microsoft Community License (Ms-CL) is more like the GNU General Public License, in that it allows users to view, modify, and redistribute the code and ensures that any larger work distributed as a single file also needs to be licensed under the same license.
The Microsoft Reference License (Ms-RL) is a reference-only license that allows users to view the source code but not modify or redistribute it and therefore stands no chance of being approved.
The other two licenses, the Ms-LPL and Ms-LCL, are limited versions that only allow code to be run on the Windows operating system, and would therefore fail to meet the 10 criteria of the Open Source Definition.
The criteria cover free distribution with source code and license and the ability to modify, the integrity of the author’s code, no discrimination against particular persons or fields of endeavor, and that the license must be technology neutral with no restriction on other software, and no dependency on a specific product.
When the licenses were introduced in late 2005, the Free Software Foundation Europe noted that the Ms-PL and Ms-CL appeared to satisfy the four freedoms that define Free Software.
That would give the licenses a good chance of meeting the 10 requirements that make up the Open Source Definition, but there are no guarantees. Even if the license were found to have met all 10 criteria, the OSI has been actively trying to reduce license proliferation and it could be that Microsoft’s licenses are seen as too similar to existing licenses to warrant separate approval.
In the meantime, Microsoft’s willingness to work with the OSI indicates that the company is not only open to discourse with open source decision-makers but also reinforces the OSI’s position as the arbiter of open source-ness.
The OSI recently announced a clampdown on the use of the term open source by vendors that do not use OSI-approved licenses, leading some to question the organization’s authority. While the OSI board is currently self-appointed, the organization is in the midst of discussion about transferring to become a membership organization.
