In his keynote at OSCON, Microsoft General Manager of Platform Strategy Bill Hilf announced that Microsoft is submitting its shared source licenses to the Open Source Initiative. This is a huge, long-awaited move. It will be earthshaking for both Microsoft and for the open source community if the licenses are in fact certified as open source licenses. Microsoft has been releasing a lot of software as shared source (nearly 650 projects, according to Bill). If this is suddenly certified as true open source software, it will be a lot harder to draw a bright line between Microsoft and the open source community.

This was the news that really blew my head off this day. By releasing 650 projects to the Open Source community, this will mean a whole lot of upcoming softwares on the Linux and Windows desktop. If some of you are not quite familiar with the Shared Source License, it's a Licensing scheme of Microsoft that permits its partners and developers to view the source of some of its products. An example of this is the ability for a Microsoft MVP to apply to view certain parts of Windows XP source code (though I really doubt that this will be included in the Open Source Initiative). Developers (MSDN members) has been the sole beneficiary of this initiative, until now. Here's a short list of developer softwares that "could" be included on the Open Source Initiative (most of it are already located on CodePlex).

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/Licensing/Developer.mspx

At the same time, Microsoft officially announced the availability of it's own Open Source web site (http://www.microsoft.com/opensource).

As they always say. If you can't beat them, join them!