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

[Scott Castaline]

Greg Freemyer wrote:
> 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
Never knew that, I'm not really one that gets into the legalese of 
things period. I just go by what I'm told when it comes to that kind of 
thing. That was what pushed me over the edge to never be involved with 
having to support M$. I felt that to just understand all of the 
licensing lingo you had to be a lawyer, no time to concentrate on the 
techie side. Thanks for the enlightment, now I'm not so depressed 
anymore ;=>