On August 9,
Office 2010, Microsoft produced wonderful on its guarantee to submit its Shared Supply licenses towards the Open Supply Initiative for consideration as certified open-source licenses.Microsoft submitted two of its three Shared Source licenses for consideration: The Microsoft Permissive License (MS-PL) and Microsoft Community License (MS-CL). It didn't submit the Microsoft Reference License (MS-RL).Based on Microsoft Port 25 blogger Jon Rosenberg:“We’ve also provided the license approval committee with our analysis of how these new submissions contribute to the body of OSI approved licenses. In addition we’ve sent an e-mail towards the license-discuss alias,
Windows 7 Ultimate Key, describing the submission. We look forward to some lively discussion on license-discuss over the next week.”I asked at the end of July why Microsoft might be seeking OSI approval now (after rejecting that idea a year ago). My ZDNet blogging colleague Dana Blankenhorn noted that SugarCRM (one of Microsoft;s interoperability partners) recently received OSI approval for its license. Blankenhorn believes the OSI intentionally is herding cats and attempting to corral all of them in the OSI pen,
Office 2010 Home And Business, avoiding an open-source licensing war.Do developers care whether Microsoft;s Shared Source licenses are OSI-approved? To customers?