Microsoft resumes bashing open source
,----[ Quote ]
| What I got from Clint Patterson, public relations director for Microsoft's
| Unified Communications Group, went a couple notches beyond the "competition
| is healthy" category of platitudes I'd expected. Instead Patterson offered a
| broad criticism of open-source businesses that hark back to days of yore when
| top executives called the collaborative programming philosophy "un-American"
| and a "cancer."
`----
http://www.news.com/8301-13580_3-9780445-39.html
And they want to come to the OSI, eh?
Related:
My resolve to treat Microsoft like any another license submitter is being
sorely tested.
,----[ Quote ]
| They haven't stopped at pushing a "standard" that is divisive, technically
| bogus, and an obvious tool of monopoly lock-in; they have resorted to lying,
| ballot-stuffing, committee-packing, and outright bribery to ram it through
| the ISO standardization process in ways that violate ISO's own guidelines
| wholesale.
|
| [...]
|
| This is not behavior that we, as a community, can live with. Despite my
| previous determination, I find I'm almost ready to recommend that OSI tell
| Microsoft to ram its licenses up one of its own orifices, even if they are
| technically OSD compliant. Because what good is it to conform to the letter
| of OSD if you're raping its spirit?
`----
http://opensource.org/node/192
Microsoft not so 'open' after all?
,----[ Quote ]
| Head of open-source group says more than half of licenses don't pass muster
|
| [...]
|
| Michael Tiemann, president of the non-profit Open Source Initiative, said
| that provisions in three out of five of Microsoft's shared-source licenses
| that restrict source code to running only on the Windows operating system
| would contravene a fundamental tenet of open-source licenses as laid out by
| the OSI. By those rules, code must be free for anyone to view, use, modify as
| they see fit.
|
| [...]
|
| By his count, the OSI has rejected "two dozen" or so license applications for
| language that restricted the use or redistribution of software and its source
| code, even when the restrictions were written with what Tiemann
| called "moral" intent. For instance, the OSI has rejected license
| applications from Quakers and other pacifists who sought to prevent the use
| of software for weapons such as landmines.
|
| "I am highly sympathetic to that point of view," he said. "But the OSI is not
| in the business of legislating moral use. We allow all use, commercial or
| non-commercial, mortal or medical."
`----
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9028318&intsrc=news_ts_head
|
|
