Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Attempts to Quash OSS Recommendations
An anonymous reader writes "Inside Higher Ed has a story detailing Microsoft's attempt to alter a report created by the Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education. Gerri Elliott, corporate vice president at Microsoft's Worldwide Public Sector division, complained about recommendations in the report to look into 'open source' and 'open content' at higher education institutions across the country. Elliott, who is on the voting committee, waited until the last minute and tried to have the report changed after a public vote. Although she does have a point that 'open source' is a development model, it still has collaboration at its heart. Can Microsoft argue against 'open' and win?"
But if they are thinking GPL way, ... outcomes are presented for public use but you are not allowed use it, even though they paid for a portion of it;
GPL covers only redistribution without providing source, not use. Proprietary software has all the same restrictions, and many more. You can read more about it, including seeing the actual license (something you apparently have not done), at http://www.fsf.org/
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
On the contrary, there is a perfectly good legalese word for free-as-in-beer: gratis. It is the free-as-in-speech concept for which there is no generally recognized succinct legal term. Libre is commonly used in the OSS community to denote the concept, but in legal circles, libre is more commonly used as an astrological reference.
So, it doesn't look to me like this bears on Microsoft's products very much at all. They aren't saying ditch MS Office for Open Office, or ditch Windows for Linux. They aren't saying use open standard formats instead of closed proprietary ones. They aren't even saying you should prefer open source software development tools to proprietary ones.
If I read correctly, what they're saying is that people should develop new courseware and let other people use and improve it. Which is pretty much the way scholarship works. The job of the scholar, as we now understand it, is to innovate. You can't expect every instructor to teach the same topic the same way, much less institutions. Scholars have to use other scholar's work and have to let their others use their work. The only rule is to give credit where credit is due. Scholars who don't let others take their work and improve on it, or tailor to their own purposes, might as well move to a cave at the top of a distant mountain. Sages they may be, but scholars they are not.
This looks to me likea pointless, self inflicted PR wound.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I think you're still missing the point. If the government were to support the development of GPL software, the product would be available for use by everyone. Microsoft would have just as much access as anyone else. If they wanted to modify and redistribute the software, they'd be obliged to release the code just like everyone else.
But no-one is forcing them to do that. They are still free to develop closed-source code and charge what they like for it. The only thing they aren't allowed to do is modify the government-sponsored GPL code and then sell it back to the people who have already paid for the initial development. Actually, they could even do that, but they'd have to provide the source code as well.
These arguments always confuse me. The GPL gives everyone more access to software, not less. Microsoft hasn't been forced to open the code to Windows just because GNOME exists. If the government sponsored some close-source software development, not only would Microsoft not be able to incorporate it into their own productes, they couldn't even see the source. GPL is no more restrictive for MS than any other software. It's actually less restrictive, since they can see exactly what the code does, should they wish to make their own products compatible.
The whole argument boils down to: no freedoms good (the status quo), some freedoms bad (the GPL), all freedoms good (unrestricted use of FOSS code, even to the point of taking it out of the FOSS realm by closing your source). This is silly.
yp.
It is not the law that says that corporations are people. It's not even the judges that say that. It's a fscking law clerk who put it down as such, and it became precedent. Bah.
Having writen a few grants, yes they are. If your grant request references this type of document & it's relevant, then you get brownie points on the scoring. All other things being equal, the grant that is trying to impliment a new policy/vision that's been officially endorsed will win - unless the reviewer is opposed to the notion of the grant of course :)