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Dvorak On Microsoft/Novell Deal

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the they-all-wear-party-hats dept.

zaxios writes, "John C. Dvorak has weighed in on the recent Novell-Microsoft pact. Among his insights: 'Microsoft has been leery of doing too much with Linux because of all the weirdness with the licenses and the possibility that one false move would make a Microsoft product public domain at worst, or subject to the GPL at best.' But now, 'the idea is to create some sort of code that is jammed into Linux and whose sole purpose is to let some proprietary code run under Linux without actually "touching" Linux in any way that would subject the proprietary code to the GPL.' According to Dvorak, it's only a matter of time before Linux is 'cracked' by Microsoft, meaning Microsoft figures out a way to run proprietary code on it."

2 of 218 comments (clear)

  1. Meta-flamebait by 2.7182 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I have come to think of any Dvorak story posted by Slashdot as meta-flamebait. They know it is just going to cause the comments to degenerate into a total circus of hatred.

    1. Re:Meta-flamebait by number6x · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think its more that Dvorak is almost completely clueless, but is very well spoken and is a good writer. He sounds competent to the PHB's, but to anylone who is familiar with the GPL and open source, he sounds like a complete ignoramous. All GPL'd code must be copyrighted. The GPL cannot be applied to public domain software, and it cannot make proprietary code into public domain code. Just read the GPL. The GPL and Copyright go hand in hand. So no matter how well he writes, he just comes off as an idiot. Since so many paople take him seriously, this leads to the flame wars over the well written non-sense he prints.