Messages in this thread | | | From | Miles Lane <> | Subject | One more ZDNet article with BillG hammering Linux and Open Source. | Date | Wed, 20 Jun 2001 17:31:02 -0700 |
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http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2777283,00.html
(an excerpt)
Linux and open source
ZDNet -- Can you clarify Microsoft's position on Linux and open source? There has been a lot written about it in the last week. What's Microsoft's objection to open source and Linux?
BillG -- I don't want to dwell on this. Craig Mundie (Microsoft's senior vice president of advanced strategies) is the expert. There is this whole history that free software is developed often in the academic environment, where basically government money funded that work. And then commercial work is done. TCP/IP came out of the university environment. Now, 90 percent of the implementations you buy are commercially tuned and supported. And then the companies that do that commercial work pay taxes, create jobs, so the government keeps funding more research, primarily in universities. So that ecosystem where you have free software and commercial software, and customers always get to decide which they use, that's a very important and healthy ecosystem.
ZDNet -- How does the GPL (GNU General Public License) factor in?
BillG -- There is a part of open source called GPL that breaks that cycle--that is, it makes it impossible for a commercial company to use any of that work or build on any of that work. So what you saw with TCP/IP or (e-mail technology) Sendmail or the browser could never happen. We believe there should be free software and commercial software; there should be a rich ecosystem that works around that. There are people who believe that commercial software should not exist at all--that there should be no jobs or taxes around commercial software at all. And that's a small group, but the GPL was created with that goal in mind.
And so people should understand the GPL. When people say open source they often mean the GPL. When someone asks a question, "So what about open source?" do they mean open source or do they mean the GPL? We believe in that ecosystem and having the mix of free and commercial software.
ZDNet -- What's your position on publishing source code?
BillG -- We have no objection to people publishing source codes. We do that ourselves under certain terms. Some of our source codes are out there and very available, like Windows CE. Some generally require a license, like Windows itself. We have no objection to free software, which has been around forever. But we do think there are problems for commercial users relative to the GPL, and we are just making sure people understand the GPL.
Unfortunately, that has been misconstrued in many ways. It's a topic that you can leap on and say, "Microsoft doesn't make free software." Hey, we have free software; the world will always have free software. I mean, if you characterize it that way, that's not right. But if you say to people, "Do you understand the GPL?" And they'll say, "Huh?" And they're pretty stunned when the Pac-Man-like nature of it is described to them.
ZDNet -- Does Microsoft plan to make more of its source code available to customers? You already do that with Windows; do you plan to expand that in any way to the applications?
BillG -- We keep making it easier and easier, and anything people want source code for, we'll figure out a way to get it to them. It's kind of a strange thing in a way because most commercial customers don't want to recompile kernels or things like that. But they want to be able to know that things can be supported.
We have some very cool tools now where we don't have to ship you the source. You can debug online, through the Internet. So it means you don't have to get a bunch of CDs. If you really want it for debugging and patching things, we can do that through the Internet. That's a real breakthrough in terms of simple source access. I don't know that anyone has ever asked for the source code for Word. If they did, we would give it to them. But it's not a typical request. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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