Regardless of what you might think of Microsoft's Community Promise I'm sure that it will generally be seen as a step forward, that Microsoft yesterday stated that the Community Promise will apply to ECMA 334 and ECMA 335 specifications (this affects C# and the CLI). In the blog entry from Peter Galli, it was pointed out that this means that "Microsoft provides assurance that it will not assert its Necessary Claims against anyone who makes, uses, sells, offers for sale, imports, or distributes any Covered Implementation under any type of development or distribution model, including open-source licensing models such as the LGPL or GPL"
http://port25.technet.com/archive/2009/07/06/the-ecma-c-and-cli-standards.aspx