CNET News.com's Stephen Shankland reports on Ximian's decision to change the license of Mono, the project to provide an open source alternative to Microsoft's .NET. Ximian, observes Shankland, appears to have made a philosophical shift, in moving from the GNU GPL to the less-restrictive MIT X11 open source license. Shankland writes . . .

“Ximian is changing the license for a key part of Mono, a project designed to duplicate Microsoft's .Net software. Mono had been covered by the General Public License ( GPL), the same license that governs Linux, but a newer version of reusable software modules called 'classes' stored in 'class libraries' will be changed to a license that permits the software to be used in closed-source projects.”

“The change was made to accommodate Intel, which wanted to contribute to class library work but chafed at the GPL's requirement that software remain open-source only, said Ximian co-founder Miguel de Icaza . . .”

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