> > Bill, this is very well put. (Careful with the allusions to the Germans,
> > though; there's that little rule about losing arguments, you know.)
> > FWIW, should _we_ ever be approached by MSFT, _I_ won't sanction such a
> > meeting. And if we were to meet with them, I would do as Smitty
> > suggests: and feed them credible misinformation.
> >
I think that this is wrong. I agree that a meeting with M$ is clearly not the
thing to do. However, it's not very "open" or "free" if we were to feed them
misinformation. The reason M$ is so afraid is because we can be so free and
open. We don't want to be like them. We want them to be like us. I think the
danger is that they will show us some of their code (whether we can even
understand it or not) and then make some bogus claim that GPL'd software uses
what they showed us.
I also don't think that Linux is about anti-M$. I heard an interview recently
on NPR's "FreshAir" with Linus (you can hear the whole half hour, BTW on
their website with RealAudio). He said that the reason he GPL'd the kernel
was self interest -- to make sure that no one else could steal what he was
doing, or what anyone else might contribute. It does work out nicely that we
have something to battle the Titan with, however.
Without Linux, where would we be? *BSD doesn't have the cachet of Linux, and
I imagine it has something to do with their Licensing -- too free and open.
M$ doesn't have to worry about what's going on there, they can just take the
work of contributors and make it their own, beat them at their own game. They
can't do that with Linux. Not even a little bit. ESR makes the point (in the
Cathedral and the Bazaar) that the GPL prevents Linux from forking like the
*BSD's: why bother? It wastes too much energy to do that. How many versions
of *BSD are there? Net, Open, Free, then there's Solaris, Apple's Mac OS X,
etc, etc. In the Linux world, there's only Distributions, which isn't the
same kind of thing at all. How does M$ deal with that? No fragmentation and
they can't buy it or steal it? What are they going to do?
Based on this, I don't think we have anything substantial to be afraid of. I
would, however, advise caution about a meeting anyway. :-)
Russell
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