The Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) and Microsoft Reciprocal License (Ms-RL) achieved the OSI seal of approval on the recommendation of its License Approval Chair.
Microsoft’s interaction with the open source community has ranged from the covertly hostile to the openly hostile. OSI president Michael Tiemann sounded almost apologetic in announcing the news.
Microsoft came to the OSI and submitted their licenses according to the published policies and procedures that dozens of other parties have followed over the years. Microsoft didn’t ask for special treatment, and didn’t receive any, he wrote on his OSI blog.
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, he wrote.
Tiemann is also vice president of open source at Linux distributor Red Hat, a company that Microsoft chief exectuive Steve Ballmer recently claimed is pushing code that infringes on Microsoft intellectual property.
He noted that the decision came through the overwhelming (though not unanimous) consensus of those in the open source community, and that the more licenses OSI approves, the more open source code is likely to be released into the community.
Both Microsoft licenses have been in use since 2005, when they won the approval of the Free Software Foundation.
