Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 16th Oct 2007 20:45 UTC, submitted by Rahul
"Acting on the advice of the License Approval Chair, the OSI Board today approved the Microsoft Public License and the Microsoft Reciprocal License. The decision to approve was informed by the overwhelming (though not unanimous) consensus from the open source community that these licenses satisfied the 10 criteria of the Open Source definition, and should therefore be approved."
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Member since:2005-08-18
And then sell the customer all kinds of not-open-source code, because the open source stuff doesn't do much for customers.
Well, they could do this even if they used the BSD, GPL or any other of the existing licenses. They could still use the OSI logo and still pretend to be more OSS friendly than they actually are.
Member since:
2005-11-02
This is not a conspiracy theory; it's pretty clear to me that this is 99% of the motivation for these licenses. The next time a customer says "I've heard that Open Source is the next big thing; I want to get some of that," the MS rep can say "We do open source, too. No need to go to another company." And then sell the customer all kinds of not-open-source code, because the open source stuff doesn't do much for customers.
This does several things: First, it prevents MS from losing some sales. Second, it muddies the waters... someone who gets nothing special from MS after being told that MS does OSS too is less likely to understand why switching to OSS would be a benefit. Third, it serves as a PR plus for MS who get to look more benevolent. Fourth, it probably helps MS legally in the monopoly department (don't ask how, they're lawyers will find a way).