Open Source at Microsoft: Microsoft’s licenses get approved by OSI
Bill Hilf at OSCON 2007 announced that they were going to submit shared source licenses to OSI for the approval process, and today Microsoft got official open source blessing from OSI (via ars technica).
Although OSI validation of Microsoft’s licenses is a very big win for Microsoft and the open-source software community, this victory is overshadowed by Microsoft’s aggressive attitude towards open-source software. Certain vocal factions of the OSS community will express extreme distrust for Microsoft’s open-source licenses, which will make it difficult for the company to build a bridge with the broader OSS community. Microsoft’s unsubstantiated patent threats and blatantly dishonest studies don’t help the situation.
Game of Life by Demirtunc
While Stefano Maffulli is not optimistic about it, on the contrary I still believe that as far as Microsoft’s partners will be progressively embracing open source, Microsoft will eventually turn this into a long term strategy. As a matter of fact Microsoft’s business is mostly about infrastructural software, and they might take advantage of the pervasive capillarity of Microsoft’s partners (750.000) to foster collaborative development over their proprietary technologies.
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