Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 22nd Sep 2007 18:42 UTC, submitted by Rahul
The Microsoft Permissive License, one of two licenses the software maker submitted to the Open Source Initiative for approval as open-source licenses in August, is unlikely to be approved in its current form. There have been two principle objections to the license from the open-source community, Michael Tiemann, the president of OSI, told eWEEK in an interview here at the annual Gartner Open Source Summit on Sept. 20. The first objection is that the use of the word 'permissive' in the license title implies an expectation that the license does not meet. The second complaint is that the MS-PL is incompatible with a large number of other open-source licenses, he said.
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Member since:
2005-07-24
The use of the word permissive in the license name is questionable, indeed. I can go with that.
But challenging the license on grounds of it being incompatible with too many other OSS licenses? Say what? Let's keep firmly in mind what the FSF means when they employ the euphemism "license compatibility" with respect to the GPL. They mean that a GPL project may freely take from a more permissively licensed project. But the permissively licensed project does not get anything back in return. No consideration of reciprocation is ever given.
The GPL is my favorite license, generally speaking, despite its warts and the PITA it can sometimes be. Despite the roadblocks it creates to true collaboration between differently licensed projects. But let's not forget that viewed from the standpoint of projects licensed under something other than GPL, the GPL is incompatible with the vast majority of OSS licenses.
IF OSI wants to exclude Mircrosoft's license on those grounds, they need to reevaluate the GPLv2 and GPLv3 as well.
Edited 2007-09-22 19:20