From our Better Late Than Never dept: as expected, the Open Source Initiative has approved the two "shared source" licences submitted by Microsoft. The OSI says:
Microsoft came to the OSI and submitted their licenses according to the published policies and procedures that dozens of other parties have followed over the years. Microsoft didn't ask for special treatment, and didn't receive any. In spite of recent negative interactions between Microsoft and the open source community, the spirit of the dialog was constructive and we hope that carries forward to a constructive outcome as well.
As Microsoft notes, the existing licences were renamed, so the Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL) has now become the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL). It's readable, and impressively short.
The OSI is trying to reduce "licence proliferation" but must have felt that in this case it was justified.
