Open Sandbox: Microsoft Provides Sources for Web Sandbox

Peter Galli, community manager for open source at Microsoft, announced the licensing change for Web Sandbox in the company's Port25 open source community blog. Web Sandbox is not the first Microsoft product under a free license, although the rule from Redmond has been to use two of their own, the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) or Reciprocal License (Ms-RL), both approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). But since the Web Sandbox team had been working closely with Apache and other web developers, they decided to go with the Apache licensing.

The Web Sandbox is a relatively new project that Microsoft had released publicly at its Professional Developers Conference in the autumn of 2008. With Microsoft's free release of the runtime version of the code, Galli hopes to "foster interoperability with complementary technologies like script frameworks and drive widespread adoption of the Web Sandbox."