MS will be submitting some of their "shared source" licenses to the OSI. This is genuinely fantastic news, as after years of FUDing us around, they finally admit that Open Source exists, is a good thing, non-cancerous, and something with which they want to get involved.

"THE VOLE is submitting its Shared Source licences to the Open Souce Initiative for certification, as announced in a keynote speech by Bill Hilf, Microsoft General Manager of Platform Strategy, on July 26 at the OSCON Open Source Convention held last week in Portland, Oregon."

"In a not unanticipated move, Massachusetts announced today that Ecma 376, the name given to the Microsoft Office Open XML formats following their adoption by Ecma, would be acceptable for use by the Executive Agencies of the Commonwealth."

Nokia researcher Jamey Hicks recently proposed a Open Source Hardware License (OSHL) for approval by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). Is there a need for a hardware-specific license? If so, what makes hardware different from software?

"PJ of Groklaw believes Microsoft is (as usual) up to no good by pushing two licenses for OSI approval. I don't trust Microsoft any more than she does, but I don't share her seeming paranoia that every move the company makes is a deviously cunning ploy to destroy its enemies."

The head of the open-source group that will decide whether to certify Microsoft Corp.'s "shared source" software licenses as open-source licenses said that more than half of Redmond's licenses appear to automatically fail the group's rules.

Today, we reached another milestone with the decision to submit our open licenses to the OSI approval process, which, if the licenses are approved, should give the community additional confidence that the code we’re sharing is truly Open Source.

A nice round up of the latest Microsoft getting into the open source side of things by of Roy Schestowitz.