Comments about Microsoft and the GPL

[Nicolas Chauvet]

2009/7/21 Nicu Buculei <nicu_fedora at nicubunu.ro>:
> On 07/21/2009 12:04 PM, Keiran Smith wrote:
>>
>> Well looks like us linux users can look forward to some of the
>> instabilities of windows in our Own Operating Systems. What are
>> microsoft thinking
>
> I don't think you will be affected by this code unless you run a virtualized
> Linux guest on a Windows host and if you do that... well, probably you
> already have bigger problems :p
And that could be a problem for us, since the opposite (Windows on top
of linux) isn't that equivalent.
That's  because of the hardware coverrage isn't the same. (3D graphics
/ raid drivers / others).

One could say, it will be easier for Linux to live on top of windows.
That way drivers could remains closed sources and linux not a real OS
anymore, just providing few services on top of the real OS.

While the European Union is presuring to remove out IE from the next
windows bundle, /me think it would have been more valuable to only
keep the very basic hardware support layers from the OS, so everything
else could have been optional.

At least I can see one way to have the announcement turn into our
favour. It would be to have it compared with other opensourcing
announcement such the AMD/ATI one. Even if the reasons behind have
nothing to be compared, it could present theses as a success story for
the free software development scheme.
That should have be directed to end-users asking them to keep
presuring on hardware vendosr for free software solutions over
proprietary ones.

Nicolas (kwizart)