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Slides Of Microsoft Anti-GPL Advocacy
An anonymous reader links to these slides outlining Microsoft's position on Free software licenses, in particular the GPL, writing "Regarding the latest memo from MSFT, the current politics is to be against 'copyleft' type licensing... Protecting freedom is fundamental for Free Software and MSFT knows that. They don't want licenses that protect our freedom." Makes an interesting companion piece to the anti-OSS memo mentioned the other day.
Slide 1: Title of the presentation with Microsoft logo
Slide 2: The Software Ecosystem
The flow of shared knowledge goes in a circle.
Diagram shows customers to government to academia to industry and back to customers.
Slide 3: The Business of Software
subtitle: Source Code Licensing
another diagram showing the interactions between source code - Core IP on the left and business model with usage rights and binaries on the right. Arrows showing development, support, deployment, and audit connect the two.
Slide 4: The Open Source Software Model:
complex mix of elements
has produced some great software
has both benefits and drawbacks like any model
Diagram showing "development model" surrounded by "philosophy", "business model" and "licensing"
Finally, somebody please mirror these images, the bandwidth on that site is getting sucked dry.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
here
Bandwidth sponsored by danish research funding...
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
No the GPL ensures that some slug is not going to compile in my library and try to sell me back my own code. The GPL is my reward in knowing that I not going to be taken advantage of.
Got Code?
No, the term viral dates from the earliest GPL debates, long before MS even knew it existed.
well, it's an obvious hoax, isn't it? I mean, I would expect a presentation from MS to be with full-color, animated ppt slides and not something B&W that looks like it was made with wordpad!
</t-i-c>
No, I agree.. no real evidence it actually came from Microsoft, and if it did, so what? No real surprises here.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
I have a question.
/. complain endlessly about patents being inserted into open standards. The reasoning is the same, the licensing terms conflict with your chosen business model. Well the GPL conflicts with Microsoft's business model, and there is no denying that... the GPL was designed specifically to conflict.
If John Smith releases product Foo under the GPL. It becomes successful over a few years and Fred, Bob, Jay and Jake all submit changes.
Does John Smith still have the right to sell a license to the Bar company for $X? Somehow I don't think he does.
That's the heart of MS's position: they want to be able to use everybody else's IP for free while still forcing everyone else to pay to use MS IP.
No, that's really not the heart of MS's position. Most companies realize that there were a variety of acts(look up Dole-Bayh) passed by Congress in the 1980's that encouraged research firms to license their work to corporations, so as to build up a synergy of research and implementation. I'm sure Microsoft would gladly pay a licensing fee to get their hands on innovative research. It wouldn't be the first time they've paid someone for their technology, would it?
What they don't want is for that research to have been released under the GPL such that the work is now potentially tainted by other people's contributions such that they cannot legally buy rights to it from the research group without putting themselves at risk to turn over the work that they created.
You don't seem to understand that this debate has nothing at all whatsoever to do with money. Money is a symptom, not the disease.
They're simply concerned that technologies will be chosen as standards which are not available to everybody on reasonable terms. What's interesting about this is that the Linux Community and Microsoft are both concerned about the same thing.
People on
You want the same things, just two different sides of the coin. If you'd quit whining about how evil Microsoft is you'd probably realize this and could work together to establish it.
But as long as you keep fighting Microsoft, they are going to fight back. You try to force source code to be released under the GPL, then Microsoft is going to patent things to prevent you from using them.