Re: The latest Microsoft FUD. This time from BillG, himself.

Rob Landley
2001-06-21T21:26:46Z

On Thursday 21 June 2001 04:37, Henning P. Schmiedehausen wrote:
>
> Devils' advocate position: If Linux would not be under GPL but under
> BSD license, M$ may have already done so. But consider them porting
> one of their monster applications and release it just to find out that
> they've linked to GNU readline somewhere because of an QM oversight.

I said as much in an article to LinuxToday. (They buried it under a page of
commentary about Ransom Love, but they did post it.)

http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-05-10-002-20-PS

BSD forked to death in the 80's. Everybody from AT&T to Sun to IBM who saw
money in it spun off their own incompatable, proprietary version.

If MS was currently facing BSD rather than LInux, they would have "embrace
and extend"ed it long ago. Hide half of office in the system libraries (just
like windows), come out with a closed-source version, loot the open
competition for any advances but don't share yours...

> I'd guess, to them, the risk of having their core code base (their
> source of revenue) "infected by the GNU virus" is just too high.

The GPL was designed to block embrace and extend. It embraces and extends
right back. And it's torquing microsoft off big time.

> Hmmm. After all, they're already using FreeBSD. Maybe they will
> release "Windows for FreeBSD" with Office. Now that would be an
> interesting impact on Linux (I would be over there in seconds =:-) )

Just like AT&T did to free Unix in ~1984. How long before it's "Office for
BSD incidentally distributed with a closed-source copy of BSD" mutated into
"yet another incompatable proprietary operating system, just with lots of
unix code."

That wouldn't solve anything. We've been through a few years with netscape
as our only viable web browser on linux, how much fun was that?

Rember the ben franklin quote about exchanging liberty for safety. Buying
short-term gains with long-term sacrifices is a dumb idea. Been there. Done
that. Came here to recover.

> Regards
> Henning

Rob