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Re: Microsoft needs a help strategy


From: amicus_curious
Subject: Re: Microsoft needs a help strategy
Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2009 13:23:50 -0500


"Hyman Rosen" <hyrosen@mail.com> wrote in message news:RhGfl.17447$E%6.15213@newsfe04.iad...
amicus_curious wrote:
There is no benefit to the community of any real significance in
> harassing them over adding one more site to download from.  All that
> seems to achieve is to give credibility to Ballmer's warning that
> Linux is a sort of cancer that a business whould be smart to avoid.

The GPL is a generic license, written to cover a wide
variety of situations. If vendors want to make a separate
arrangement with the creators of BusyBox to avoid complying
with the GPL, they can try to do so. But there's no point.
If they haven't made any changes, they can just get a copy
of the source from wherever they obtained their BusyBox
binaries and ship that, or put it on their website. To
suggest that this is somehow onerous is ludicrous. But if
anyone wants to regard GPLed software as a cancer to be
avoided, by all means let them not use it.

Well, it seems to me that is exactly what is happening and I cannot believe that is the intended effect. If you are going to hassle any and all users of BusyBox who are only using it the way it was designed in the first place, you relegate it to a sort of persona non grata kind of software that companies will avoid due to the hassle involved. That cannot work to the advantage of the overall user community and the trivial fussing in the courts misleads everyone on the real issues.



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