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Thom,

I really do see some merit in the first argument. Where as GPL and MIT are not really descriptive, those names are not trying to be. The use of the adjective "permissive" in the name of Microsoft's license is likely *intended* to cause confusion. In the same way that OOXML (Office Open XML) was intended to be confused with Open Office's XML format.

It may be too late for the OSI to fight license proliferation without being hypocritical. But I believe it is right for them to refuse to participate in a plot to interject further confusion into the OSS license landscape intentionally.

That said, their second argument is indeed a big, flying, turd.

"Where as GPL and MIT are not really descriptive, those names are not trying to be. "

I agree with you on MIT, but GPL? The name "General Public License" would seem to suggest "Public Domain", which GPL definitely is not.

The second argument is where they get really overboard. Incompatible? What?

Not really. License proliferation is a big concern, and the OSI should have been reigning this in years ago. The Computer Associates license that is OSI approved is just one amongst a few licenses that should simply be struck off. It hasn't just appeared out of nowhere with these Microsoft licenses.

Incompatible licenses build walls between open source communities, and doesn't break them down. Quite frankly, I don't think the OSI should be encouraging wall building.

I also believe that the OSI should just state what is on peoples' minds. They are under no obligation to simply waltz in and approve new, incompatible and pointless licenses developed by a company who doesn't have a track record with the OSI, isn't sociable and can't get along with its peers, and hasn't helped the open source movement that the OSI has tried to help build either - quite the opposite, in fact. Many people seem to believe there is some sort of conflict there or something. There isn't. The OSI owes Microsoft nothing. It is up to Microsoft to prove themselves.

As if the GPL is compatible! Compatibility is a two-way street in my book, and in that respect, the GPL is anything but compatible.

People are actually using the GPL.

Hopefully, all this will make the OSI function better as an open source organisation, and get companies, not just Microsoft, to prove their open source credentials first.

"The OSI owes Microsoft nothing. It is up to Microsoft to prove themselves.
...
People are actually using the GPL.

Hopefully, all this will make the OSI function better as an open source organisation, and get companies, not just Microsoft, to prove their open source credentials first."

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OSI owes Microsoft nothing, but they do owe themselves their own credibility. And they don't appear to be making the arguments that you're making. If your arguments are the real issue, let OSI have the guts to say that rather than hiding behing what appear to be BS arguments (I say "appear", because as I said earlier, the article provides virtually no details).

You say Microsoft needs to "prove themselves", well I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft has released lots more code under MS-PL than the total code released under many of the current OSI licenses, many of which were created for a single product or single group of related products, and are still only used for those products today. Obviously the amount of GPL code dwarfes the amount of MS-PL code, but the amount of MS-PL code dwarfes that of many OSI licenses.

There has been lots of code released under MS-PL (I just recently incorporated a MS-PL'ed zipfile lib into one of my hobbyist projects), including major code such as the DLR (which is one of the reasons Miguel's team got Moonlight running so quickly). Other well-known MS-PL projects are IronPython and IronRuby.

Here's the thing: The MS-PL code that is in use today is "open source code" whether OSI certifies it as such or not. Now, if OSI doesn't want that code to have their impramature, that's up to them, but Microsoft and others are releasing MS-PL code with ever increasing frequency, and it wouldn't look good for OSI for there to be such a large and important set of open source projects out there that lacks OSI's impramature. In such a scenario, the OSI "brandname" begins to lose relevance.

So, IMO, it would behoove OSI to have legit technical (rather than political) reasons to reject MS-PL, if they end up doing so. And maybe the reasons *are* legit, but we need more info regarding that.

But if the bottom line is indeed political (as you are saying), then OSI needs to say that explicitly.
(The problem with doing that is that certain OSI members urged the submission of MS-PL, so to now say that they reject it for political reasons leaves OSI open to the charge that this whole thing was merely a game; just a charade to get the opportunity to publicly reject MS-PL as an "open source" license.)

For my own part, I'm inclined at this point to believe that this isn't political, that there is some technical issue at hand, but we don't have enough info to know for certain either way. But we can still have fun speculating on both the technicalities and the politics.

Edited 2007-09-23 00:25

It's incompatible with the GPL and the code can't be ripped out of the file and put into another file under a different license. But the MSPL is a file-based license, so you could combine it with GPL files into a module if the GPL would have allowed combination. Basically the permissions that MS-PL demands run afoul of the permissions that the GPL denies.

Microsoft doesn't want to give its code to the GPL crowd. It may be a move to weaken the GPL, but why should that matter? The key is that it seems to be an Open Source license under the OSD and the code could be quite useful in non-GPL Open Source projects running on Linux or elsewhere.