For Approval: Microsoft Permissive License

[Michael R. Bernstein]

On Thu, 2007-08-16 at 22:30 -0700, Bill Hilf wrote:
> Chris:
> [snip]
> The other license submission question you raise is about additional
> licenses in an era when the OSI is trying to reduce license
> proliferation.  There are already several hundred community projects
> that use these licenses, including over 150 Microsoft projects; while
> these are two more licenses they represent a reasonably large set of
> existing code, the authors and users of which would benefit from
> having the licenses assessed as Open Source.
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Chris DiBona [mailto:cdibona at gmail.com]
> >
> > [snip]
> >
> > Finally, why should yet another set of minority, vanity licenses be
> > approved by an OSI that has been attempting to deter copycat
> > licenses and reduce license proliferation? 

Bill,

While I am sure that having the MS-PL and MS-CL licenses approved as OSD
compliant would be of enormous benefit to the projects in question and
indeed Microsoft itself, I don't think that was the actual thrust of the
question.

How does approving these licenses benefit the Open Source community as a
whole, especially given that these licenses seem deliberately crafted to
dig a moat separating the authors and code of the projects in question
from any other open source license or code cooties, rather than building
a bridge?

This is a serious question, even if the OSD-compliance of the licenses
does not hinge on it.

- Michael R. Bernstein
  michaelbernstein.com
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