For Approval: Microsoft Permissive License

[Russ Nelson]

Matthew Flaschen writes:
 > a. Is MS-PL a permissive license?  If not, should OSI ask/require that
 > it be renamed?
 > 
 > I don't think it's permissive in a meaningful sense, because other
 > permissive (as the term is generally understood in the FOSS community)
 > licenses allow incorporating into source code works under other
 > licenses, provided that the permissive license and copyright notice is
 > preserved, and MS-PL does not.
 > 
 > Thus, I think Microsoft should rename the license.

My opinion is that we should approve it regardless of the name.  Is it
the Library General Public License or the Lesser General Public
License?  In either case, the license didn't change.  I put MUCH LESS
WEIGHT on the names of things than some well-known and hirsute free
software advocates do.  The thing is the thing regardless of what you
call it.  It's free and open source software whether you call it Free
Software(tm) or Open Source(tm).

Will the name mislead anybody?  Not after this discussion, it won't.

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