[via O’Reilly]

Sometimes, it is good to bring this kind of discussion down to earth.

While many people see Microsoft as the “enemy” of open source, Microsoft has in fact been busy learning from open source, and has released source code for more than eighty Microsoft projects under a “shared source” license. In addition, there are about six hundred programs (notably dotNetNuke) released by independent developers under Microsoft shared source licenses. As in the open source world, many of these projects have ended up with small license variations, creating unnecessary complexity.

[…] Based on a quick read, the non-limited versions of these licenses look like they might well be able to meet with OSI approval as open source licenses. I’d urge Microsoft to go ahead and to go ahead and submit them to License-Discuss for OSI Approval, and become a full-fledged member of the open source community.