Linus Defends Proprietary File Formats [Updated]

Simon (S2) writes "Torvalds launched a blast against OpenOffice.org, and defended Microsoft's right to keep its binary Office formats proprietary. 'I'm happy with somebody writing a free replacement for Microsoft Office. But I'm not fine with them writing a free replacement just by reverse engineering the proprietary formats,' said the Linux founder. 'Microsoft has its own reasons for keeping them proprietary, and I can't argue with that.' At the heart of Torvalds' decision to refrain from using Bitmover's BitKeeper source code management tool last week, a day after BitKeeper decided to drop its limited functionality free client, is a dispute between BitKeeper developer Larry McVoy and Samba developer Andrew 'Tridge' Tridgell. It has subsequently emerged that Tridgell was working on a clean room reverse engineered implementation of McVoy's proprietary software, and Torvalds has come down on the side of his friend McVoy." Update: 04/13 17:24 GMT by T : As reader Daniel Callahan points out, this is a goof. "The Register article made up the Torvalds quote. The article offers the quote and then continues: 'Actually he didn't - we just made that quote up. But what Torvalds really did say this weekend is only slightly less bizarre.'"

Comments

Maybe the problem is that The Register sucks

[AlphaHelix]

Everybody is blasting Slashdot, the submitter, and their mother for running a fake quote in the Slashdot headline. Doesn't it seem like it's maybe a wee bit irresponsible (read: incredibly irresponsible) for a supposedly legitimate news outlet like The Register to run a fake quote at the top of their article, and follow it up with, "Just kidding!" The cardinal rule of article writing is that the likelihood that somebody will read a paragraph is inversely proportional to how far into the article it is. So, if you lie in the first paragraph and clear it up in the second, about half of the people who read it won't ever make it to the second paragraph. These clowns think their prose is amusing or something, but it's just badly written and irresponsible.