Open source lovers that see Microsoft as the Evil Empire will no doubt be displeased by this move. But among the blogosphere more fair minded individuals say that the licenses are in fact very open. Blogger Mitchell Ashley, who writes The Converging Network blog summed it up nicely:

The MPL in particular is really a very open license. You can modify, distribute, commercialize and charge for modifications. It doesn't skirt the edges of open source but rather embraces it. Microsoft has had three licenses (one wasn't submitted) as part of their Shared Source Initiative, a way for Microsoft to dip it's toe into the world of open source.

The story says: The board of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) has approved two Microsoft Corp. licenses that allow proprietary source code to be shared, a move that is likely to inspire protest and spur controversy for die-hard open-source proponents. The Microsoft Public License (MPL) and the Microsoft Reciprocal License (MRL), two of Microsoft's so-called "shared source" licenses, are now viable OSI licenses for distributing open-source code alongside more widely used community licenses such as the GNU General Public License and the Mozilla Public License.

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