"At the O'Reilly European Open Source Convention, Jason Matusow of Microsoft announced a plan to simplify their plethora of shared source licenses, reducing the count to three (or, more accurately, five) variations: the permissive license, the community license, and the reference license. The permissive license is most like the BSD license; the community license is most like the Mozilla license; and the reference license is a "look but don't touch" license. The permissive and community licenses have variations that limit source distribution to the Windows platform."
Tim O'Reilly, the author of this quote, urges Microsoft to submit them for OSI approval as open source licenses.
Microsoft has understood the availability of open source frameworks and applications is an important factor in the succes of their development platform. Open source Frameworks around J2EE and .NET seem to be converging, as is also demonstrated by the speaking slot on "Open source frameworks for .NET" at this (Dutch-spoken) upcoming seminar .
Posted by Pascal Van Hecke at October 24, 2005 05:30 PM