Re: [ox-en] Why is Microsoft Attacking the GPL?
- From: Russell McOrmond <russell flora.ottawa.on.ca>
- Date: Sun, 8 Jul 2001 11:50:47 -0400 (EDT)
On Tue, 3 Jul 2001, Stefan Meretz wrote:
http://www2.linuxjournal.com/articles/currents/0032.html
Why is Microsoft Attacking the GPL?
...
Mr. Gates made the following statement last week to a CNET News.com
reporter: "The ecosystem where you have free software and commercial
software--and customers always get to decide which they use--that's a
very important and healthy ecosystem", Gates told the interviewer. But
the GPL, Gates says, "breaks that cycle--that is, it makes it impossible
for a commercial company to use any of that work or build on any of that
work. So what you saw with TCP/IP or Sendmail or the browser could never
happen. We believe there should be free software and commercial
software; there should be a rich ecosystem that works around that."
There is an important misconception being conveyed here which we, the
Free Software community, seem to be allowing. That is that the 'opposite'
of Free Software is "Commercial Software" when in fact the opposite is
*proprietary* software. Gates is trying to make linear two totally
different axis given that you can have Free Software that is Commercial,
and proprietary software that is non-commercial.
There are many commercial companies, such as my own, that almost
exclusively use Free Software in their solutions to customers. The real
"software ecosystem" is not harmed by using Free Software. In fact, it is
using Free Software (specifically the GPL with it's "derivative insurance
policy") that protects that very ecosystem given that it is proprietary
software that breaks the cycle since if a non-paying commercial customer
(EG: an academic researcher, home user, whatever) were to "use any of that
work or build on any of that work" it is called "software piracy", and
Microsoft themselves are active in trying to have people charged for it.
I wrote an article about this long ago, hoping to have a change made to
the Hackers Dictionary (currently maintained by Eric S. Raymond, who
largely created the Open Source philosophical separation from the Free
Software movement), and many of these updates were made:
http://www.flora.ca/commercial-software.shtml
---
Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/>
RMS clarifies Freedom http://www.gnu.org/press/2001-05-04-GPL.html
New Campaign for Fuel Subsidy Honesty! http://www.flora.org/taxpayer/
Proprietary education/government http://mai.flora.org/forum/27389
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