This one is for readers who develop and distribute their source code which may or may not contain source code licensed by other developers.

Microsoft is trying to loosen up and make less legalese on some of their software licensing with their new Shared Source licenses.

Microsoft Corp. is slashing the number of licenses it will use for its Shared Source Initiative from now on, while at the same time radically shortening and simplifying the text of those licenses. The move, which will be announced on Wednesday morning at Oscon, the O’Reilly European Open Source Convention in Amsterdam, will see Microsoft cutting back the more than 10 Shared Source licenses that currently exist to only three template, or core, licenses.

These new shared licenses include the following licenses, which I read through and made brief descriptions for my own reference (shared here with readers, of course):

Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL) - view, modify, redistribute source code for commercial or non-commercial. Least restrictive, most open.

Microsoft Community License (Ms-CL) - allows for both commercial and non-commercial modification and redistribution of licensed software using a file-by-file basis, so if you want to have specific components released with source code with less strict licensing, Ms-CL could be useful. Intent is to keep community-based code available to to community, while allowing companies to commercialize and license under their own licensing terms value added code that interacts with the community code. Ms-CL is royalty free code.

Microsoft Reference License (Ms-RL) - source code cannot be used for other than viewing and reference purposes. It cannot be reused. Microsoft will commonly use this for developer libraries where modification is not required to use the source code. The transparency is important so the developer can understand what the underlying library is doing so s/he can better interact with the source code.

I like the simplistic language for these licenses. They are definitely more user/developer-friendly. Thank you, Microsoft!

• I need to license some code under the WTFPL
• “return to Sender ID” says Apache and open source groups
• Study compares MySQL to commercial code
• Red Hat draws scrutiny over use of Movable Type
• 70,000+ free stock photos
• Academic or “anemic” software?