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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.
Stop equal Free Software with freedom, you don't really have much more freedom than with closed software, infact, in many cases you have much less.
Diversity is good, but GPL is the wrong route as it kills diversity.
Go public domain!
There was a long period in which Microsoft did not suck. This ended in 1991 or so, at which point they had the money to be total fucking cockbiters to everyone in their path. Shortly thereafter their software quality went waaay down.
Word 5.1 for Macintosh is the best word processor I've ever used.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
Prove that they have been inflating their product numbers. Stop talking out of your ass.
evil adrian
What software goes straight from Academia to consumer? Nothing I can think of. I don't think I've ever seen (C) University of (whatever) in a retail program, except of course BSD but that's not something that most consumers have even heard of.
Way too much of the software I've seen from Academia is placed under an "Academic use only and you can negotiate rights if you want" deal. That's even worse than GPL because when you see that "call us" business it usually means they want thousands of dollars just to let you see the code. That's kept a lot of good libraries out of shareware and forced small shops to re-invent the wheel. It would be nice if these universities published some kind of royalty schedule for small developers. If they still want the big corporations to "call them" that's fine. The big corps have the $$$.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I don't know if this shit came from Microsoft or not but one of the statements:
..."
"Primary research results placed under the GPL are precluded from commercial use *TCP/IP example
I didn't realize that TCP/IP was GPL'd but the laughable part is that this suggests that we would all be better off if the TCP/IP protocol were proprietary. Can you imagine if Microsoft controlled this protocol?!
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Because the GPL is "viral" it is just the wrong license to publish academic works under because of the following characteristic:
- You can't integrate it with a commercial product to further advance innovation. (In fact you can't even look at the source and write your own implementation because you might be subject to the GPL's "viral" effects then)
I think it's one thing to share your modifications and derivative works at will, but it is IMHO not okay to force someone to release a whole product into which you integrated it.
btw: As surprising as it may be, Microsoft also pays taxes and therefore funds academic projects.