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Re: [school-discuss] Fwd: A Landmark Announcement
- To: schoolforge-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Subject: Re: [school-discuss] Fwd: A Landmark Announcement
- From: lee rodgers <sregdoreel@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 9 Nov 2006 08:35:57 -0800 (PST)
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Well, since we're all top-posting horribly, I thought I'd just interject w/ a quote from GrokLaw
"..I read that as saying that there's an intent to have their FOSS cake and eat it too, i.e., they tried to work *around* the GPL rather than just follow it. They know the GPL code can't be encumbered with patents, but they want to do it anyway. I read that as clear intent to sidestep the spirit of the GPL while embracing a perceived loophole in it, to profit from the GPL without adopting it. And by they, I mean Novell too. It agreed to this deal."
This makes perfect sense from MS's perspective, and gives us insight into the quandry MS is in: MS *CANNOT* do OpenSource ... at least, not directly.
MS's main line of bizniz has increasingly become *reinventing the wheel* (wait, that was always their MO.. ;-) b/c of the plethora of FLOSS projects out there. Starting with Apache on Linux many M$ tools now duplicate FLOSS / free
projects (instead of the other way around so many years ago ...).
Think of all the big software shops ... Adobe/MacroMedia, Sun, CA, IBM, Oracle, BlackBoard... they're on the verge of being eclipsed by FLOSS. So what to do? Get into the stream & offer mgm't tools (sometimes lacking in FLOSS projects) that they can wrap around the free stuff...
The next big wave is Open Courseware/Content that'll go along with all the free tools.. imagine free curricula to go along with LiveSwif, AviDemux, GIMP, Blender, etc....
What this tells me is that they know they can't conquer the Open Source Hydra .. commercial distro or not, there's so much going on that's not GPL, in BSD (which M$ borrows from), Postgres (in the fully free area) and the GPL'd work in Gnu & Linux that it's simply not feasible to start throwing lawyers around w/out ending up in a counter-suit quagmire of mutually assured distraction...
/lee
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/lee
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