"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 .
If anyone criticized the Office 12 announcement for being vague on details, what to think about the Google-Sun cooperation announcement ? The Google-effect pushed up Sun's stock value over 20% in the 48 hours before the announcement, but it dropped back to normal when some details of the announcement became clearer. Or at least, when people realized the complete lack of details and the absence of short-term implications.
Basically, the announcement says that Sun and Google will cooperate to make it easier for consumers to acquire Sun's Java runtime, Google's Toolbar and the OpenOffice.org desktop suite. Sun will include Google's Toolbar as a downloadable option to consumer versions of its Java runtime environment. In addition, the companies will explore possibilities to "promote and enhance Sun technologies" such as Java and the OpenOffice.org suite.
It is clear that Sun wants to use Google's powerful software distribution power to push some more Java runtimes into the market and to acquire more StarOffice/OpenOffice users. Some analysts expected the announcement to be the launch of the "Google Office", a productivity suite offered by Google and hosted on Sun Galaxy servers, but that may be the topic of a future press conference. The companies first want to see what the reaction is to making the Google toolbar available on the Java Web site. Probably not a lot, as it is Sun, not Google, that can use more help in distributing its technology. It would have made a much bigger impact if anyone who downloads the Google Toolbar, would get the opportunity (and assistance) to download the Java runtime environment and the OpenOffice productivity suite...
Some of the better links about this are: