Microsoft apologizes to Open Source Initiative for policy violation

After outcry from various constituencies over the past couple of days, Microsoft has pulled from its CodePlex site its Sandcastle project for failure to comply with the terms and conditions required in order to be qualify as bona-fide open source.

Sandcastle is a documentation compiler for managed class libraries that was labeled as being available under the Microsoft Permissive License, one of two Open Source Initiative-approved licenses under which Microsoft provides access to its source code.

Sam Ramji, head of Microsoft's open-source and Linux team, posted an apology on behalf of Microsoft to the OSI to the Microsoft Port 25 blog on June 6. He also said, per his instruction, Sandcastle was unpublished, effective immediately, from Microsoft's CodePlex code-repository site. If and when th SandCastle team agrees to publish the source code, the project might be reposted in the future, Ramji said.

From Ramji's blog post:

"A number of people have alerted me in the last 24 hours that a Microsoft project called Sandcastle, located on Codeplex, used the Ms-PL and called itself 'open source' yet never posted the source code.

"This is unacceptable and represents a violation of Microsoft’s Open Source policy. I take it extremely seriously....

"I apologize to the OSI on behalf of Microsoft for this mistake."

When I first heard rumblings over Sandcastle licensing earlier this week, I was doubtful Microsoft was willing to risk the wrath of the OSI over a documentation  compiler. It's good to see Ramji & Co. do the right thing here.