MPL

Microsoft's Internet Explorer continues to hemorrhage market share to Mozilla's open-source Firefox browser. But Microsoft is set to surpass Mozilla in one area: adoption of its open-source Microsoft Public License (MS-PL), according to research from Black Duck Software.

The MS-PL is now used by 1.02 percent of open-source projects. This is impressive given that it was only approved by the Open Source Initiative some two years ago. The Mozilla Public License (MPL), by contrast, has been around for many more years and is used by 1.25 percent of open-source projects, ranking ninth in terms of popularity. … Read more

CNET's Stephen Shankland has already picked up on Google's decision to allow two popular open-source licenses back onto its Google Code open-source repository. Up until now, the Mozilla Public License (MPL) and Eclipse Public License (EPL) were both banned from the site.

The reasoning Shankland reports for Google belatedly approving the licenses, however, is a bit bizarre. In the case of the EPL, Google's Chris DiBona argues:

Eclipse is an important, lively, and healthy project with an enormous plug-in and developer community that uses an otherwise duplicative license. They aren't interested in using the BSD or … Read more

First it was the Affero General Public License that Google banned from its Google Code site, an open-source code hosting site. Google contended that it didn't want to encourage license proliferation by accepting projects using licenses that don't have widespread use and acceptance.

This week, however, Google nixed a highly popular, important license license: Mozilla Public License.

Google's Chris DiBona played the proliferation card again against the MPL, but also admitted that how Google determines whether a license is suitably popular is "so arbitrary." Great. That makes me feel better. At least there's a … Read more

Microsoft has hired Rob Conery, founder and lead on the SubSonic project, reports eWeek. SubSonic is a DAL (Data Access Layer) that helps a Web site build itself. Got that? Neither did I, but it sounds cool, if too technically complex for a layman like me.

This is all mildly interesting. After all, Conery has apparently been on contract with Microsoft for the past eight months and is an "MVP" (Microsoft Most Valuable Professional, which is a bit like being a community lead in the open-source world--it means you know your Microsoft stuff).

What is very interesting is that Microsoft will likely be including SubSonic with its products, and that SubSonic will remain under MPL 1.1:… Read more

I took a look at Mindquarry today, a new open source collaboration company funded by Hasso Plattner Ventures. The company is based in Germany. Mindquarry licenses its software under the MPL.

Mindquarry's core product is a collaboration server that allows teams to collaborate on documents, as well as via wikis and shared tasks. It's an interesting product now, but should get much better with the release of its email integration, due out this summer according to the company's roadmap. All in all, it feels like a simple alternative to Sharepoint or Basecamp, a comparison the company has made.… Read more