Director of Source Program at Microsoft Corporation Jon Rosenberg submitted its Shared Source License called "Microsoft Community License" to Open Source Initiative for considering it as an OSI approved Open Source License.

Apparently having an Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved license does matter.

Companies that had once shunned the official open source label while still operating as open source entities are starting to adopt a new OSI license, the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL).

The Open Source Initiative approved on July 25 its first new license in quite some time: the Common Public Attribution License, which is essentially the Mozilla Public License with a new attribution clause.

The Microsoft Permissive License, one of two licenses the software maker submitted to the Open Source Initiative for approval as open-source licenses in August, is unlikely to be approved in its current form.

"The Open Source Initiative has announced that the OSI Board has approved the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) and the Microsoft Reciprocal License (Ms-RL) as satisfying the criteria of the Open Source Definition, following their submission in August..."

After a lengthy consideration, the Simple Public License (SimPL) has been added to the list of approved licenses. The concern was that because the SimPL is a reciprocal license, it could create its own ghetto of code unusable by any other project. However, because it contains language that allows relicensing under the GPL v2.0 or v3.0, this will not happen.

I have to say I'm disappointed. CentricCRM released a significant chunk of code under an OSI-approved open-source license, yet still doesn't seem to appreciate that open source means something to the community, and to the industry.

The Open Source Initiative's chairman, Michael Tiemann, announced Friday that the organization's licensing board have officially approve the version three of the General Public License and Lesser General Public License as OSI-approved.

Most Open Source Projects (Not the namesake open source projects) are released under an OSI approved license. The open source definition of OSI states that "Open source doesn't just mean access to the source code.