Free Republic

Great virtualization-driver giveaway Microsoft is embracing cancer to help ensure Windows survives server-room consolidation. The company has released 20,000 lines of Windows kernel code under version two of the GPL. Microsoft called the license it once hated "the community's preferred license".How things have changed. Back in 2001, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie described the GPL as a threat to users' intellectual property and the independent commercial software sector. The great majority of Linux is licensed under GPL, and about the same time as Mundie was sounding off, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer called Linux a "cancer". Linux...

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the General Public License (GPL), the great enabler of the open source movement, were sued last Thursday for restraint of trade under the Clayton Antitrust Act (15 US Code Section 26) in the US District Court for the Southern District of Indiana. The pro se suit, filed by physicist, computer programmer and Groklaw gadfly Daniel Wallace, charges that the GPL “contract licensing scheme” artificially fixes software prices. Wallace is asking the court for an injunction that would outlaw the use of the GPL in the United States. The four-page suit claims that the “Free...