Articles :: Technology :: Microsoft Going After GNU/Linux Again
written by Toby Miller on May 14, 2007 May 14, 2007
Every now and then I'm asked why I don't like Microsoft products. It's not really the products that I don't like as much as the short-sighted decisions that the company makes for the sole purpose of enriching themselves. I believe in giving back for the sake of giving back, not for the sake of good P.R.
Open Source Software (particuarly GPL) is great software because of the community of developers that commit/donate their own free time to create it. Take away the community and you take away the software.
Microsoft has all of these software patents that their shareholders want them to capitalize on. So their intention is to nail GNU/Linux for as many of them as they can (currently they're claiming around 235) via backdoor deals with companies like Novell and Redhat. Ok, let's set aside the fact that software patents are difficult as hell to enforce and that Microsoft had to bend the rules to even find a way to charge annuities for them and that any type of real-life patent battle between these software giants will ultimately just waste a giant load of money trying to capitalize on a movement that will ultimately fail because the community doesn't give a damn about particulars and that they're creative and will just find a new way of creating free software to share with the community and the whole ordeal will just fail in the end anyhow. Let's just say, for discussion's sake, that that none of that applies and Microsoft is successful at killing GNU/Linux as it's known today and manage to get their annuities like they wanted. Well, great for them ... today. But where will all of that great open source software go from there? Where will it be in 5 years? GNU/Linux is just at the top of the pile of great free open source software out there and something like this would quickly trickle down the ranks. Do you think that developers, designers, testers, documenters, donaters and general community contributors are going to continue to spend their passionate interests on this free software knowing that someone else is profiting from it? Also knowing that someone else is freely plucking out whatever parts of their application they want to just to wrap it into another new product without sharing that new product back with them? I'm failing to see the upside for these valuable members of the open source community to continue contributing their time. In fact all I see is a guaranteed way to squash everything that makes open source the great thing that it is today and push us all back to the days of black hat shadow deals and spies on the payroll. No thanks.
Killing open source is wrong + Microsoft wants to kill open source = Microsoft is wrong (my 2ยข)
Read the full article:
http://money.cnn.com/magazi.....33867/index.htm
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