On Saturday 03 July 2010 11:26:27 Rahul Sundaram wrote: > > On Friday 02 July 2010 16:20:43 Balaji Damodaran wrote: > >> It was surprising that no one is flaming IBM yet. They're not so > >> friendly to opensource either > > > > pure FUD - IBM has made available a huge amount of code as open source > > and there are huge resources built and maintained by IBM to support open > > source. > > It is not as black and white however. For example, they hold the > largest number of software patents in the world and continue to strongly > lobby for expanding the scope of patenting in the world. They even > argued to the Supreme court in US that software patents benefit free and > open source software. >
nothing is black and white - take yahoo!, they contribute their satellite images freely to openstreetmap, release a lot of the code they write into open source and happily patent a lot of software. There is an old english proverb 'he who lives in a glass house should undress in the dark'. If we apply the principle of only black and white, very few if anyone on this list qualifies to be here. (certainly I do not). But let us be reasonable - there is a huge amount of 'white' in IBM which is thus much higher on the side of the good guys than microsoft. Of course Redhat is almost pure white on the scale. let people who use fully free software on their mobiles, who do not touch google apps, who only use non-patented hardware flame IBM. Let the rest of us keep our peace. -- regards kg http://lawgon.livejournal.com/ _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
