> Seems it's not open source per se he thinks is against the American way
> etc, but is more concerned about the GPL - the 'infectious' bit,
> paragraph 2B "You must cause any work that you distribute or publish,
> that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any
> part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third
> parties under the terms of this License." This is what will stifle
> innovation, apparently because anybody who adds to/uses GPLed code has
> to make the source available to everybody else. He (or at least the MS
> spindoctors) likes the BSD license better.
This got me thinking about Microsoft's motives. Consider this for
a conspiracy theory:
1) They just bought out Corel (subject to regulatory approval) who have
their own well-advertised version of Linux
2) They are under pressure from Linux and are encouraged to port
their applications to Linux or otherwise respond to the Linux phenomenon
3) They start to moan about the GPL being "un-American"; maybe a BSD style
license that allows proprietary derived works would be more acceptable
to US legislators after a suitable "education" campaign.
1+2+3 = Microsoft Linux(TM): a non-GPL non-free proprietary derived
work featuring embrace and extend specials for the Intel platform. The
education campaign can mention that MacOS X did it with BSD software.
You heard it here first.
Stuart.
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