Somebody in the thread at some point said: Hi Mike - >> Running Fedora is a political choice that has ramifications. Microsoft > > Bah. I run Fedora for my own reasons, none of which is political. > Any choice has consequences, both positive and negative. Because it violates the interests of powerful people, who operate in the legal or politcal domains, it is political. >> - specifically - hate the fact you choose to run Free software and want >> to take control of that possibility. If Microsoft succeed in their > > "Microsoft" is not an entity. It is a corporation, made up of people. > I am sure that most/all of the employees of Microsoft neither know nor > care what OS I have on my machine. That's certainly the case. However, "Microsoft" acts as a single legal entity. "Microsoft" signs contracts and makes agreements: there is a single guiding hand. With Linspire for example from this Gartner article: ''Here is the gist of what Microsoft has to offer to those willing to come clean; Under the PR guise of a “Covenant to Customers” at least 3 Linux publishers have climbed on board. Essentially, if any of the GPL/GNU concepts are touched on, the “Covenant” is violated. With the exception of patches, any other modification or alteration of the code is not allowed, nor is it okay to make copies of the software to give away to your friends - unless of course, additional fees are paid to Microsoft. Remember, we are talking about Linux - not Microsoft products. Microsoft excludes a number of things from this EULA for LINUX, including anything released under GPL3 because of the clause (section 10 paragraph 3 GPL3) expressly forbidding the imposition of restrictions or fees on anything released under GPL3 ... The Covenant to the Customer promises that you - the consumer - won’t be sued so long as you use an extremely narrow set of programs distributed by Linspire. Business applications and servers are explicitly excluded from the “allowed” programs list.'' http://rackit.gartnerwebdev.com/2007/07/23/linspire-punked-by-microsoft/ So this is Microsoft's official corporate view of Linux: you cannot legally use any "business applications" or "servers", you cannot use any GPL3 stuff, and you can only use packages with patches from Novell, Xandros and Linspire. Here they say it in their own words: http://www.microsoft.com/interop/collab/linspire/customer_covenant.mspx ...where you learn even that is only for 3 years unless they extend it. >> reason I will occasionally post about events concerning Microsoft that I >> consider important whether you like it or not. > > It's unfortunate that so many of these exchanges degenerate into > this sort of fencing. What do you think should happen, I clear my posts through two Joe Randoms first? Do you? -Andy
