They got their licenses approved by the OpenSource Initiative. The people at OSI argued that it was a good move by Microsoft; and the people who warned about Microsoft's bad intentions and arguing against approval of the licenses were de facto ignored.
Now, the people at Microsoft (oh; yes, not Microsoft, the corporate entity) are calling the licenses "Shared Source". There appear
to be other licenses which are not approved by the OSI which Microsoft calls "shared source".
Given the enormous public relationship machinery they have, Microsoft is going to re-brand the OSI approved licenses as "shared source"; and in public eye, "open source" is going to be associated with "shared source".
This is what is bringing me to RMS. I am often wonderstuck at RMS' ability to foresee the future.
His statements on use of the term "Open Source" are turning out to be prophetic. People often insist that the term ``free software'' is confusing; and RMS used to (and still does) insist that the term open source is even more so.
With this googly from Microsoft, one needs to wait and watch for one or two years to find out which term is going to be more confusing; and which term is going to be associated with users' freedoms.
