For Approval: Microsoft Permissive License

[Jon Rosenberg (PBM)]

When I committed in my last posting to consulting the community on future license revisions, I really wasn't expecting that I'd be doing it this week. :-)  Nevertheless, it seems that opinion on the Permissive License name is divided and it's time to make good on that commitment.  While we also couldn't find anything in the OSD that mentions the license name, the fact remains that some folks do not feel that the contents of the license are clearly communicated by the term, "Permissive."  We have also sought feedback from the hundreds of licensors who are using the Microsoft licenses today.  They told us something quite different: that the Community License name did not adequately communicate the fact that this license was reciprocal.  As I stated in my previous post, our goal is clarity and transparency.  The goal of the license titles was clear differentiation between a reciprocal license and a permissive license, so I would like to propose a revision that I hope will get us closer to that goal.  I would like to get all of your feedback on the following name revisions:
*       Microsoft Community License becomes Microsoft Reciprocal License
*       Microsoft Permissive License becomes Microsoft Open License
I look forward to your feedback.  Thanks.

Jon

-----Original Message-----
From: Matthew Flaschen [mailto:matthew.flaschen at gatech.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2007 4:59 PM
To: License Discuss
Subject: Re: For Approval: Microsoft Permissive License

Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Matthew Flaschen (matthew.flaschen at gatech.edu):
>
>> I'm talking about what they use, not what they're supposed to use.  I
>> can give many examples of times OSI has been reluctant to approve an
>> OSD-compliant license.  For instance, they held off on SimPL because it
>> was (mistakenly) believed incompatible with GPLv2.
>
> I imagine Board members regard it as perfectly appropriate to delay
> consideration of a licence where Board members wish to encourage the
> drafter to consider some change, or to ponder some practial problem or
> badly written wording.

This is what I suggest in this case.

> Let's face it:  Many new licences have been pretty dumb ideas in a variety of ways, and are likely to remain so
> (human perversity, and in particular the perversity of many licence
> drafters, being what it is).

Agreed.

  Were I on the Board, I'd probably be in
> absolutely no hurry to vote on those, either -- and would regard that
> fact as in no way contradictory of the process shown on
> http://www.opensource.org/approval .

Whether it's contradictory of the approval process, I can't say.  But
it's certain that many dumb license ideas are in fact OSD-compliant.

Matt Flaschen