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.

The OSI License-Discuss mailing list has been ablaze for the past few days since Microsoft submitted its Permissive License (MS-PL) to the OSI [Open Source Initiative] for official open source license approval.

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 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..."

If you ever plan on writing an open source program, then you must make an important decision, selecting a program license. Generally for open source programs, there are two main licenses that most developers take into consideration. These licenses are the Gnu General Public License, and the BSD license.

After years of hostility towards Free Software Foundation (FSF) licensing (here and here) Microsoft has announced the first in a series of PHP patches - and it's using an FSF license.

Setting the legal nuances of the chosen open source license aside, wouldn't two products under any open source license have the same claim to the open source moniker?

I really, really don't understand this. I understand that Microsoft has a history of aggression against open source, as Chris DiBona wrote recently on the Open Source Initiative's (OSI) license-discuss e-mail list. I compete with Microsoft and have for many years. I get that Microsoft has been bad.

"...We heard from you, the community, that you wanted to be able to both contribute to and distribute our code under a truly open source license — “open source” as defined by the Free Software Foundation and Open Source Initiative. To that end, we have decided to add an additional license to the Aptana IDE: the GPL..."