This could get interesting.
by T. Colin Dodd
PC World - Microsoft Seeks Open-Source Certification
After months of antagonizing the open-source community, Microsoft Corp. now appears to be trying to engage it by seeking an official stamp of approval for the licenses that the company uses to share its own software and source code.
During a keynote speech at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, Ore., on Thursday, Bill Hilf, Microsoft’s general manager of platform strategy, said that the software vendor is submitting its so-called shared source licenses to the Open Source Initiative for certification as true open-source licenses.
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Neither OSI President Michael Tiemann nor Mark Radcliffe, the organization’s general counsel, returned e-mails and calls seeking comment on Microsoft’s announcement.
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In his blog on CNET Networks Inc.’s Web site, open-source executive and OSI board member Matt Asay said that seeking the group’s approval shows that Microsoft “respects the community.”
“I welcome this move by Microsoft,” Asay wrote. “It continues to impress me as being one of the few big companies that truly understands open source, even if I don’t always like how it works with the open-source community.”
UPDATE:
July 29, 2007 (Computerworld) — 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.
Michael Tiemann, president of the non-profit Open Source Initiative, said that provisions in three out of five of Microsoft’s shared-source licenses that restrict source code to running only on the Windows operating system would contravene a fundamental tenet of open-source licenses as laid out by the OSI. By those rules, code must be free for anyone to view, use, modify as they see fit.
“I am certain that if they say Windows-only machines, that would not fly because that would restrict the field of use,” said Tiemann in an interview late Friday.
August 1st, 2007 at 8:22 am
It is in Microsoft’s greedy interest to “dilute” or otherwise render the Open Source Definition meaningless. It’s one way of confusing and dividng the FOSS community.
Besides, if Jim Wilcox’s (and others’) hunch is right, and Microsoft *has* been violating open source licenses by filching open source code, then it is also in their interest to dilute the meaning of open source.