Microsoft, evidently off its meds and exhibiting an increasing tendency toward bipolar behavior, says it's going to submit two one-page shared source licenses to the Open Source Initiative (OSI), the arbiter of all open source licenses that has been widely criticized for admitting way too many of the things into the fold and for just rushing through wiki software maker Socialtext's Common Public Attribution License without the full approval of its followers.

The Attribution License requires that users cite the source of contributed pieces of code.

Microsoft has five shared source licenses and didn't say which two it was talking about. Two of them restrict the use of code to the Windows platform, which would be a problem for OSI. So throw them out.

That leaves its Permissive License, the most liberal of the bunch, which lets users view, modify, and redistribute the source code for either commercial or non-commercial purposes; its Reference License, which lets users view the source code but not modify or redistribute it, another open source no-no; and its Community License, which lets users view, modify, and redistribute code and says any larger work distributed as a single file also has to be licensed under the same license.

While Permissive and Community are the most likely submissions, OSI has previously rejected the Community License when a third party submitted it.

There are evidently some 500 projects using the licenses.

According to a posting on Microsoft Port 25 blog by Jon Rosenberg, director of source programs, "the decision to submit our open licenses to the OSI approval process…should give the community additional confidence that the code we're sharing is truly open source."

And he ascribes Microsoft's motives for the move to "the needs of our constituents driving our priorities for licensing, infrastructure and process. Although open source at Microsoft and the OSI are two different animals, I would submit to you that both are at a point in their maturity where their constituencies need to become more involved to maintain growth."

Concomitantly, Rosenberg suggests that OSI should cease to be a self-appointed arbiter and become a membership organization.

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