This morning, we were excited to learn that two of Microsoft’s Shared Source licenses have been approved by the OSI. It’s been an interesting and educational couple of months since we submitted these licenses (we announced our intent in July, and submitted on August 10th.) I personally enjoyed hearing the wide diversity of opinions from the community, including the legal professionals who weighed in on the discussion.
During the discussion period, we were pleased to respond to the communities requests for additional clarity in the licenses by renaming them to the Microsoft Public License and the Microsoft Reciprocal License. In the process of the license discussion, we also heard additional calls for more clarity in our communication regarding the wide range of Shared Source licensing options available from Microsoft. Some Shared Source licenses clearly meet the open source definition and others do not. In the future, we will continue to solicit feedback from the community to ensure crisp delineation of these different license types on our website.
As we continue to work with the open source community, we look forward to ongoing feedback on how to improve our participation and provide greater transparency to all of our customers and partners. I’d like to thank Russ Nelson and Michael Tiemann for their guidance throughout this process and I would like to thank all the members of the community who contributed to this discussion on the license-discuss alias. I think you’re going to see a lot of great code come out under these two open source licenses and we are happy to be able to call them, “OSI Approved.”
I look forward to continued vibrant discussion with the Open Source community,
Jon