[Discussioni] Gates' grand design

[Andrea Capriotti]

Vi invio alcuni passaggi molto interessanti di questa intervista a Gates:
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1014-201-6325584-0.html

E' il solito FUD ma veramente chiaro e ben circostanziato.

"How does the GPL (GNU General Public License) factor in?  

There is a part of open source called GPL that breaks that cycle--that
is, it makes it impossible for a commercial company to use any of that
work or build on any of that work. So what you saw with TCP/IP or
(e-mail technology) Sendmail or the browser could never happen. We
believe there should be free software and commercial software; there
should be a rich ecosystem that works around that. There are people
who believe that commercial software should not exist at all--that
there should be no jobs or taxes around commercial software at
all. And that's a small group, but the GPL was created with that goal
in mind.

And so people should understand the GPL. When people say open source
they often mean the GPL. When someone asks a question, "So what about
open source?" do they mean open source or do they mean the GPL? We
believe in that ecosystem and having the mix of free and commercial
software.

What's your position on publishing source code?

We have no objection to people publishing source codes. We do that
ourselves under certain terms. Some of our source codes are out there
and very available, like Windows CE. Some generally require a license,
like Windows itself. We have no objection to free software, which has
been around forever. But we do think there are problems for commercial
users relative to the GPL, and we are just making sure people
understand the GPL.

[The whole theme of what we are doing with developers is XML Web
services.] Unfortunately, that has been misconstrued in many
ways. It's a topic that you can leap on and say, "Microsoft doesn't
make free software." Hey, we have free software; the world will always
have free software. I mean, if you characterize it that way, that's
not right. But if you say to people, "Do you understand the GPL?" And
they'll say, "Huh?" And they're pretty stunned when the Pac-Man-like
nature of it is described to them.

Saluti
-- 
Andrea Capriotti