On Wednesday 15 August 2001 02:35, you wrote:
> > > 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.
There is nothing wrong with giving your sworn enemies misinformation. The
rules of war apply here. ms has no compunction about lying to even their
customers!
>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.
No, it has to be revealed under a non-disclosure agreement or to an accessory
of a criminal act involving theft of the code. If a ms employee just gives
you a some of the XP source code without any such agreement, you can do
whatever you want with it.
>
> 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?
What they are doing right now: Attempting to undermine linux by divide and
conquer, attacking the gpl, and constantly changing their tactics to
disorient their enemies, namely, us.
>
> 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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