Microsoft’s quest for shared-source approval

If Microsoft, or any other company, wants to become a member of the free and open source software community it should be asked to adopt an existing licence, or to help in the long term process of rationalising the existing licences, and play with the community rather than against it. Tiemann has already hinted that Microsoft’s primary offering, the Microsoft Permissive Licence (MPL), will fail the procedure because it is not “permissive” as the term is understood by the open source community, and because “the specific innovation of maximum incompatibility of the MPL is not what we were looking for, so I think what we have is a submission that has two fairly major strikes against it.”