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OSI Asks Microsoft to Change the MS-PL
Xenographic writes "The OSI has identified two significant flaws in the Microsoft Permissive License, and is unlikely to approve it as an OSI license in its current state. Specifically, the OSI is worried about the way the MS-PL is incompatible with so many other OSI-approved licenses and how misleading that makes the term 'permissive' in the license's name. Now the ball is in Microsoft's court and they can choose to amend or withdraw it from consideration. From the article: 'The MPL is also particularly restrictive, and is uniquely incompatible with the maximum number of other open-source licenses, [president of OSI Michael Tiemann] said, noting that in its examination of license proliferation, the OSI had encouraged experimentation with license terms to encourage new ones to be written that were better than what currently existed.'"
Because you can't say that a given license is either more or less permissive than any other. It's not a total order. Take GPLv2 and GPLv3 for example. If either of them were strictly more permissive, you would be able to relicense from one to the other. But you can't since the GPLv3 prohibits you from using patents to close off the code, and GPLv2 prohibits you from adding any new probihitions. Or take the XFree86 license and GPLv[2-3]. The XFree86 license requires attribution to a greater extent than the GPL, while GPL requires other things that the XFree86 license does not. Neither can be said to be "more permissive", because they require and allow different things.