On Saturday 07 September 2002 8:20 pm, Paolo Falcone wrote:
> MS is allowed to study the code (there's nothing wrong with
> studying...). What is forbidden for them would be to rip the code, add
> proprietary extensions and close the derivative product under a non-GPL
> compliant license.
>
> Afaik, the GPL doesn't involve copyrighting the algorithms... so unless
> one would use GPL'd code in a project, the derivative need not be GPL'd.
> But it doesn't mean that one ain't allowed to study the algorithms
> behind the code.
It's actually worrisome when you don't have the source code for Windows to
verify if indeed there is no "ripped code" in there. Microsoft will always
laugh at us and say:
"Hahahaha! Did we or did we not rip your GPL code? We won't let you see the
code, so use your ESP and make your best guess! Without proof or evidence
(lack of source code) that we ripped your code, no one can take us to court!
And we have a billion dollars in cash reserves to take advantage of all open
source' hard-earned coding work for free! Use your stable branches then stamp
our brand Microsoft in it! No sweat Research & Development, easy money! All
we have to do is integrate it with our mature GUI technology and make it
really usable. We have well-funded usability labs, you know. And all you
Linux vendors/distributors who are either broke, or lack the financial
stability to compete with us can only envy our marketing machine!
And all you pathetic Linux distros who compete with one another have
to endure the l-o-o-n-g wait to ratify the Linux Standards Base. We can
standardize our systems faster than you, because we're a much integrated
company. And you can always delay your individual progress by pitting
your technologies against one another, urpmi vs. apt-get, KDE vs. Gnome, Qt
vs GTK, ext3 vs reiserfs. Go ahead Linux people, divide your developers mind
share!
So sweat it out all you open source hackers! We might use your code someday,
but that's for you to guess if it's in Windows! Until then, happy hacking!
Nice free work on Samba, hackers! We also rejoice you've made it faster
than our very own SMB. We can inspect your sources and might integrate your
code in our revisions of SMB someday! Thanks for the free work!
We'll just use any of your work, all your kernel hacks probably soon, but
you'll never know...We'll not release the source code of Windows, you know.
Someday, we'll have our revenge and run the Linux OS as an application in
Windows, like what you do with Windows in that Win4Lin and WINE sh*t. And it
will run stable too, because there's a Linux-like kernel in Windows that does
it. Of course, you'll never know if it's really there...
Hahahaha! Now we know how to leverage open source and make it work for us."
Microserfs! Go forward and conquer! We're the Napoleons of computing!
Sincerely,
Ballmer and B*tthead
I wonder how FSF, Open source, and all freedom-loving computing citizens of
the world can do about this. Isn't it scary?
mikol
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