Microsofts new way of bashing Linux

[Florian Diesch]

"Michael T. Richter" <ttmrichter at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 2006-15-06 at 09:00 +0200, Florian Diesch wrote:
>
>     Which is just wrong. The GPL is there to protect your intellectual property.
>
> Exactly how does the GPL "protect" my intellectual property?  As far as I can
> tell it gives my intellectual property to everybody for free.

My car still stays my property even if I allow others to use it for free
under some conditions.

The GPL doesn't give the right to use software for free (as in free
beer). It just gives you the right to copy and modify it for free if you
got a copy. But it's perfectly OK to charge lots of money for giving you
a copy (you'll get the sources for free then).

But the GPL makes sure the software remains your property, and if
someones pirates GPL software (e.g. by distributing it without providing
the source code) you can go to court (depending of the laws of your
country of course).  

The strength of the GPL is of course that it requires you to license
any derived work under GPL. And it seems to me that's the point
Microsoft doesn't like about it because they can't use GPL software like they
use e.g. BSD style licensed software.


>     > Free-libre has to be non-commercial?  You need to build IP to make money?
>
>     One of the big problems when selling software is to find someone to buy
>     it. Giving your software away for free and selling support may get you
>     more money.
>
> Compare the monetary worth of Bill Gates and the monetary worth of whoever runs
> Red Hat.  Who sells the software?  Who sells the support?  Which of the two is
> wealthier (by a few orders of magnitude)?

Microsoft got IBM to license there software and distribute it with their
PCs which got them into business. Digital Research wasn't that successful
with DRDOS like many other software companies with their products nobody
ever noticed.

But look at Troll Tech: About 10 years ago it was a small company in
Norway nobody ever noticed. Then they made Qt free for private use (or
something like that) and it was discovered by some programmers and used
to develop a new desktop environment for Unix. KDE was very successful
but often criticised for depending on the nonfree Qt libs. Finally Troll
Tech was convinced to release Qt under GPL. Today Qt is one of the big
players when it comes to cross platform application development (and I
guess they make good money with it - commercial licenses for Qt aren't
exactly cheep).

Given the fact that starting with Qt 4 there's a GPL windows version of
Qt it seems that Troll Tech thinks the GPL is a pretty good way to
protect their intellectual property in a way that gets them money.


   Florian
-- 
<http://www.florian-diesch.de/>