For Approval: Microsoft Permissive License

[Jon Rosenberg (PBM)]

The past 6 weeks have been a tremendous learning experience for Microsoft. The community has been passionate and insightful in its response to our submission of the MS-Community and MS-Permissive Licenses. We saw new perspectives on some of the issues that came up for us as we were drafting these licenses and we heard some brand new issues as well. The community comments on our license approval submission numbered over 400. That's an important number for us. We read every mail. We weighed every point. We thought hard about the issues that you raised. I want to thank you for being supportive, challenging and vocal. We submitted these licenses for approval in the belief that they comply with the ten criteria of the Open Source Definition and the strong response from the community indicates that they do.

One of the more controversial points that has been raised during the course of this discussion is the need for clarity. You've told us loud and clear that you want more clarity around our usage of the submitted licenses and more clarity around what is Open Source and what is Shared Source. This is completely reasonable. To that end, we commit to making changes to our Open Source and Shared Source web sites that will greatly reduce any confusion between Microsoft's various licensing programs and our use of Open Source licenses. We'll also commit to publishing a summary of those changes to the alias for feedback before publishing to the web.

We also heard varying points of view about the name of the license and some of the clauses in the license itself.  Today, we will also commit to involve the community in any future redrafting or renaming of these licenses. If in the future, we modify these licenses, we will engage in a conversation with the community through the license-discuss alias as part of the modification process rather than simply requesting approval after the fact.

We look forward to the licensing committee's decision on these licenses and appreciate the contribution that this process has made to our thinking, regardless of the outcome.

Jon