Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Steven Champeon <schampeo AT hesketh.com>]

on Thu, May 03, 2001 at 05:08:01PM -0400, Paul Jones wrote:
> speech itself
> http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/craig/05-03sharedsource.asp

 "Contrast this recent experience with the two decades of economic
  success that preceded it. The global economy grew in an unprecedented
  way in no small measure because of a generation of new companies, of
  which Microsoft was fortunate to be one. Many or even most of these
  companies invested heavily in research and development and sold their
  principal products at prices that covered their costs and generated
  profits that they reinvested in further research and development.

 "This research and development model, in turn, was almost always
  based on the importance of intellectual property rights. Whether
  copyrights, patents or trade secrets, it was this foundation in law
  that made it possible for companies to raise capital, take risks,
  focus on the long term, and create sustainable business models."

Mundie has a hell of a nerve writing about the importance of R&D given
that his company stole their GUI from Apple who stole it from Xerox
PARC, and given that they bought their first OS rather than developing
their own.

What's /really/ funny is that he represents a company that, despite
producing some of the most bloated software on the planet, still can't
produce anything so bloated that people will want to upgrade to a CPU
they don't really need, which means that the industry with which they
are trapped in a symbiotic embrace is taking it on the chin.

The answer to the recent downturn, according to Mundie? Everyone
needs to buy more than one piece of hardware (oh, gee, can anyone
say "Xbox"?) because the ones they already own are too powerful as
it is, but aren't portable enough, or tied closely enough into the
Microsoft API stranglehold for MS to survive.

 "Can the personal information technology continue to drive broad
  economic growth?

  The answer is "yes."  The computing industry needs to move to a model
  of multiple computing devices that more effectively empower people to
  unleash the computing power of the Internet and move their ideas and
  their content with them from machine to machine."

Never mind that the Internet they seek to own was developed as the
result of the open exchange of ideas. Or that their .NET initiative
is founded on XML, one of the products of said open exchange of ideas.
Or that one of the core protocols (SOAP) was developed by numerous
non-Microsoft people as an open protocol. Or that XML itself was 
derived from SGML, an open standard. Or that the Web was developed
as the result of multinational cooperation and given over into the
public domain by CERN, a European research lab. Or that their Passport
service is trying to fundamentally destroy the possibility of privacy
on the Internet. 

He goes on to say:

 "The OSS development model leads to a strong possibility of unhealthy
  "forking" of a code base, resulting in the development of multiple
  incompatible versions of programs, weakened interoperability, product
  instability, and hindering businesses' ability to strategically plan
  for the future. Furthermore, it has inherent security risks and can
  force intellectual property into the public domain."

In essence, open source is evil because it discourages security through
obscurity and encourages the adaptation of working code to new uses,
uses that large corporations are unable to provide solutions to, or 
fail to recognize due to a lack of "important customers".

Mundie, too, ignores the LGPL completely.

He misstates the GPL:

 "The GPL asserts that any product derived from source code licensed
  under it becomes subject to the GPL itself."

This is true, but he doesn't mention that the GPL says:

 "If your program is a subroutine library, you may consider it more
  useful to permit linking proprietary applications with the library. If
  this is what you want to do, use the GNU Library General Public
  License instead of this License."

Mundie goes on to say:

 "When the resulting software product is distributed, the creator must
  make all of the source code available, at no additional charge."

The GPL says no such thing. In fact, it says quite clearly:

 "You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy,
  and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a
  fee."

Nowhere in the GPL does it say that you must provide source (or even
the program compiled from source) for free. It merely says that you
may not charge to /license/ the software.

 "You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in
  whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part
  thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties
  under the terms of this License."

I'm so sick of these idiotic lies.

-- 
"Euphoria is not a business strategy" -- Louis Rossetto