On Sunday, 31 August 2014 at 04:25:11 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
He keeps harping on how MS is being evil, and GPL v3 prevents the evil MS is attempting...but jesus crap he *WILL NOT* spend ONE FUCKING WORD on ***HOW*** the shit any of that supposedly works. We're supposed to just blindly accept all of it just like the good little corporate whores he keeps trying to crusade that we *shouldn't* be. Shit.
If it's something like being on the news floor where they are talking to him, he doesn't have time. The loopholes he is talking about could take an hour of talk, not only in legal speak but in references and how things connect from law A to law B to law C, and how things actually work to the written letter of the law for an individual state (not to mention the whole country). They honestly aren't going to give him more than 5 minutes of screen time which means quite often for the large majority of people you have to greatly simplify it and keep it understandable for the general populous.
The impression i got on the Novell pact: M$ would have acquired certain copyright ownership of all the programs that the OS contained. This would include programs such as: sort, awk, sed, grep, sh, tar, cpio, cp, mv, etc. Now since they have partial ownership, rights of all related programs that duplicate their effects fall under M$'s curfew (regardless who wrote them); They could start hampering on anyone trying to distribute OSes that involve any of these programs required to make the OS run, or sue them into the ground for infringing on copyright or patents; Thereby either you paid to keep the software somewhat free (probably each and every version/subversion) or they would gain total monopoly and Windows is the only OS you can get your hands on which you pay your usual $100-$200 for.
I'm not sure how close i hit the bullseye, but i would imagine i'm not too far off. And if taken to court, they have the money and the influence to win regardless if they are right or wrong.
