[ale] OT: newsflash: Microsoft is still the devil...open source beware

Greg Freemyer greg.freemyer at gmail.com
Mon Jul 30 17:56:14 EDT 2007


On 7/30/07, Scott Castaline <hscast at charter.net> wrote:
> John Wells wrote:
> > Every member of this list should read the following article:
> >
> > http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070730120109643
> >
> > Scary how keeping up with Microsoft is like reading Machiavelli...
> > _______________________________________________
> > Ale mailing list
> > Ale at ale.org
> > http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> >
> Apple's, I beleive is doing the same thing but in a more direct
> approach. Buying up the companies that are dual licensed such as CUPS.
> Oracle bought out the company that makes the DB engine that MySQL used
> in 5.0, putting MySQL at a disadvantage, by pulling the carpet out from
> under their feet. How many more situations like these are going to
> happen and how can they be stopped? Can they be stopped or are we all
> going to become drones of just a couple of Monopolists?

Scott,

One great thing about the GPL is that if someone buys the original
license owner and tries to take the project to a non-GPL license, then
the "community" can take a copy of the source from the last GPL
release and fork out their own project.

So if the "community" really cares about that MySQL DB engine, it
could simply start up a sourceforge project and seed it with the last
GPL release and start going forward.

To me that is one of the big reasons for using a GPL project in a
bigger company.  You always know that worst case you can get the code
and do your development.  In the closed source world, you can try do
the same thing by putting the source in escrow etc.

Greg
-- 
Greg Freemyer
The Norcross Group
Forensics for the 21st Century



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