Re: [school-discuss] two-sided rant (was: Selling Open Source)

[Leon Brooks <leon@brooks.fdns.net>]

On Wed, 17 Mar 2004 10:12, Maureen E. Duffy wrote:
> Also, as I understand, the BSD licensing scheme fully allows for
> people to profit from it in this way. So Microsoft has done no wrong
> with respects to using open source code from BSD.

They haven't done any wrong, AFAICT, with the GPLed stuff the 
distribute, either. The GPL's commentary explicity blesses making a 
profit from free-as-in-liberty software.

What Microsoft _have_ done is speak out of both sides of their mouths. 
One side "speaks" by basing their business in part on FOSS, including 
software distributable only under the dreaded, terrifying 
"pacman/cancer" GPL; the other side "speaks" by criticising or at least 
damning-with-faint-praise the very same licence arrangement.

To pick a more pointed example, the second side of the mouth "speaks" by 
using the influence of their (Paul Allen's) investment vehicle (Vulcan) 
on an investor and broker (BayStar) to provide financial life support 
to a nasty, lying thorn-in-the-side of FOSS. A thorn which would 
otherwise have dived millions of dollars into the red in the last 
quarter and probably expired of cash deprivation, a demise which would 
have been greeted with joyous acclaim by of millions of people.

You can see the same thing at work when they support "software choice" 
initiatives and the bottom line is that they're only happy if you 
choose their own software: the buffer organisation acts to _reduce_ the 
available software choices.

Cheers; Leon