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● 08.01.07

●● As the Saying Goes, Who Invited These Guys to the “Free Software” World?

Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software, GPL, Microsoft at 3:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

TuxDeluxe explains some of the problems that we face now that a few unwanted guests have arrived and ‘diluted’ the impact of Free software — applications which most business have come to know and recognise as “Open Source” software.

=> ↺ a few unwanted guests have arrived

The great majority of the better known and more successful “open source” projects are released under the GPL, and can be described accurately as free software. JBoss (now owned by Red Hat), for instance, has always described itself as “professional open source” but has released its software under Free Software Foundation (FSF) licenses.

An accidental side effect of the popularity of “open source” has been a proliferation of licenses that describe themselves as “open source”, some of which aren’t necessarily compatible with each other and may or may not be recognised by the OSI, and many of which contain proprietorial clauses that don’t always work to the advantage of the licensors or the licensees.

The term “open source” has at times been misused by companies who want to gain the benefits of a wider developer community.

The latest misuse, however, has come from Microsoft, which at some point even called shared source “Open Source”. A BBC columnist who is truly loyal to Free software has contributed a piece where he describes Microsoft’s recent actions as a “chess game”.

=> ↺ called shared source “Open Source” | ↺ he describes Microsoft’s recent actions as a “chess game”

Of course Microsoft is not endorsing the larger and more challenging free software philosophy of Richard Stallman, whose GNU General Public License (GPL) places more stringent conditions on the software it covers than it could ever accept.

As Stallman puts it, “open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement. For the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative, because only free software respects the users’ freedom”.

The bottom line is that one has to watch and understand what Microsoft is trying to achieve. There is far more than meets the eye. Microsoft tries very hard to hide its long-term intentions. In another blog I have been confronting folks (possibly Microsoft employees) who say that Ballmer now praises what he once called “a cancer”. It’s a case of a crocodile tears and a subversive tactic. Beware of Greeks Bearing Gifts.

=> ↺ another blog | ↺ Beware of Greeks Bearing Gifts

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