Message-Id: <5.0.2.1.2.20010308162515.00a63a80@pop.cus.cam.ac.uk>
Date: Thu, 08 Mar 2001 16:31:37 +0000
To: Venkatesh Ramamurthy <Venkateshr@ami.com>
From: Anton Altaparmakov <aia21@cam.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: Microsoft begining to open source Windows 2000?
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
In-Reply-To: <1355693A51C0D211B55A00105ACCFE64E952C5@ATL_MS1>
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Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org

At 16:04 08/03/01, Venkatesh Ramamurthy wrote:
>My initial thought after seeing this article was that microsoft was testing
>its waters on open sourcing. If i have 1500 licenses then i would get the
>source. If i find any bug in thier source , i  would report to microsoft or
>send a patch and they would put it in thier next version. Is this not the
>same way Linux Kernel is developed?. Only thing microsoft does not want to
>immediately go full open sourcing and get embarrased at the hands of linux
>people.

You are not reading the article carefully enough.

With Linux, everyone is free to make their own changes which suit their 
particular setup, recompile the kernel, and run their own linux kernel on 
their site / server / workstation / whatever.

Microsoft specifically forbids this in their license!

It is a "look but don't touch" license which is as far away from the ideas 
of the GPL as you can possibly get.

Even submitting them a patch is technically violating their license as a 
patch implies that you have modified their code already, which is forbidden!

The only change from before that I can see is that Microsoft is going to 
make even more money now, because they will collect the money from ~1000 
instead of ~10 people. No other news there.

Anton


-- 
Anton Altaparmakov <aia21 at cam.ac.uk> (replace at with @)
Linux NTFS Maintainer / WWW: http://sourceforge.net/projects/linux-ntfs/
ICQ: 8561279 / WWW: http://www-stu.christs.cam.ac.uk/~aia21/

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