Slashdot Mirror
Linux "is not piracy" Says Microsoft Lawyer
dipfan writes "Further to this Slashdot piece on the activities of the Business Software Alliance, the BBC reports on a European conference on piracy organised by the BSA. The good news is even Microsoft distinguishes between open source software and piracy; it quotes Microsoft's top in-house lawyer Brad Smith as saying: 'Linux is a way of developing software whereas piracy is copying.' The rest of the article is the usual panic-attack about the size of software piracy in general, and how this is holding back the software industry in Eastern Europe, according to Brad. Although the article notes the irony that despite all the piracy, software sales are forecast to grow from $50 billion in 2000 to about $90 billion by 2005."
I never realized it was possible to easily confuse open source and piracy. One says "take our software--please!" and the other says "take our software and die die die!"
Maybe I just haven't been following these things very closely, but those two things don't seem to be all that similar.
Microsoft is a Software company. They make their money selling software. They don't want to try selling support or hardware or some other product to fund their software development. They want to charge for the actuall product they sell rather than shift the cost of developing software on to some other product. That's why they don't like GPLed software. With GPL software you can't sell the software itself, the expenses of developing the software must be shifted elsewhere.