"In a surprising announcement the Open Source Initiative said it had approved two of Microsoft's licences as being acceptable for licensing open source software.

While many within the open source community will view this as tantamount to allowing a wolf into sheep's clothing, the OSI board (which did not a approve a less permissive third licence) appears to be happy with these two.

OSI president Michael Tiemann wrote that the OSI board had approved the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) and the Microsoft Reciprocal License (Ms-RL)." -- Read more

Co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, Eric S. Raymond, writes:

"I find that my resolve is being sorely tested. Because Microsoft's behavior in the last few months with respect to OOXML has been egregious. They haven't stopped at pushing a "standard" that is divisive, technically bogus, and an obvious tool of monopoly lock-in; they have resorted to lying, ballot-stuffing, committee-packing, and outright bribery to ram it through the ISO standardization process in ways that violate ISO's own guidelines wholesale."

"This is not behavior that we, as a community, can live with. Despite my previous determination, I find I'm almost ready to recommend that OSI tell Microsoft to ram its licenses up one of its own orifices, even if they are technically OSD compliant. Because what good is it to conform to the letter of OSD if you're raping its spirit?"

Is Microsoft joining "Open Source"? That still sounds alarmingly suspicious indeed, but.. let's see..

Tectonic writes: "Bill Hilf, general manager of platform strategy at Microsoft, announced last week at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON), that the company was submitting its shared licences, which include the permissive license, community license and reference licence, to the Open Source Initiative (OSI) for certification as true open source licences."

So, "Shared Source" licenses, previously known as *not* adhering to the Open Source definition and for that matter the Free Software definition are submitted for approval as such. Weren't these a "see but don't touch" kind of licenses?