BTW, for those who don't have the liner notes, the Microsoft comments about
open source are almost certainly about IBM's marketing of open source
programming against Microsoft's stuff in the .NET area. I don't think they
dare name IBM this specifically, for fear of helping them market their
wares. Now when the analysts ask IBM about their strategy, they are armed
with the checklist of questions to ask. "Uhhh, how does the GPL effect your
IP, Mr. IBM?" Markoff zeroed right in on this, interviewing the IBM exec. He
says their lawyers understand how to build a firewall that keeps the GPL
from infecting everything that's not open source at IBM, which is almost
everything other than Apache. Microsoft's answer is "Pfui." (To quote Nero
Wolf.) Speaking of which I'd love to see Lou Gerstner and Richard Stallman
at a press conference explaining how their interests are aligned. This would
be one of those "I'm glad to have lived to see this" moments. Dave
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun May 06 2001 - 08:04:38 PDT