Russell Hires wrote:
>
> I'm going through Craig Mundie's speech
> (http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/craig/05-03sharedsource.asp),
> and I'm thinking okay, here's a scenario: What if MS wants their code to
> get out, not officially, but they release it to certain companies
> (partners, what-have-you), and someone in those companies leaks the
> source to the outside world, either genuinely on accident, or
> "accidentally on purpose", or on purpose, but it's not MS's direct
> doing.
>
> What do you think would happen? I can hear the hackles now as many an
> Open Source developer laughs at M$'s code. The shreiks of criticism
> sound loudly. People say, "I can't believe they did that!" or "Why don't
> they do this, instead?" Then M$ quietly incorporates this stuff. Very
> subtle.
It's not likely to happen. Anything that anyone were likely to
"suggest" for MS to "quietly" roll back into their source would have to
be audited for copyright issues. I believe, but the usual IANAL applies,
that traditionally unless specified otherwise copyright for a piece of
code still lies with the author of that code. That means that MS would
still have to get permission from anyone who would have made code
snippets to roll those snippets back into MS mainstream code.
As immoral and unethical as they are, I still have the feeling they
aren't entirely stupid and would never fall for a trick like someone
intentionally putting a piece of code under GPL and try to get MS to
include it into their codebase at large.
This is of course why MS thinks the GPL is "anti-american" but the BSD
license is perfectly business-friendly. That's because the BSD license
doesn't require that you make your code available if you incorporate BSD
code. So it's much "smarter" for MS to "utilize" the vast amount of BSD
code out there than it is to "utilize" the vaster amount of GPL code out
there. (In MS speak, translate "utilize" into "steal.")
The thing that would be more scary to me would be if MS code got leaked
out and started floating around the internet. It's highly unlikely that
any serious kernel developers would take a look at it at all, much less
a close examination, but if MS source code did leak out, I would bet
that the very next step of MS would be to require that Linux hackers
audit their code and "prove" in a court of law that no Linux code
"infringes" on any "proprietary intellectual property" that might have
been leaked out through the "accidental" release of MS source code, with
the assumption that that would be the first thing Linux hackers would do
if given the opportunity to view MS source code. It could be expensive
and ugly. Of course, if MS gets shot down, it could also wind up being
a Very Good Thing in the end, but mostly just expensive and ugly at
first.
--
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#!/usr/bin/perl -w
$_='while(read+STDIN,$_,2048){$a=29;$b=73;$c=142;$t=255;@t=map
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print+x"C*",@a}';s/x/pack+/g;eval
usage: qrpff 153 2 8 105 225 < /mnt/dvd/VOB_FILENAME \
| extract_mpeg2 | mpeg2dec -
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