Rjack wrote:
17 USC 301(a)
This is the preemption clause, which relegates all copyright to federal law. It is completely irrelevant to the GPL, because the GPL functions solely under copyright law.
Google [microsoft "fears the GPL"] and you'll get 36,000 hits. That's the result of the FSF's propaganda campaign over the years -- yet yesterday Micro$oft released 20,000 lines of code under the GPL.
Stever Ballmer is widely quoted as saying "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches." Perhaps that's the source of the "fear" impression. Also, after Microsoft and Novell arranged a patent protection deal, Microsoft moved very quickly to avoid possible entanglement in the requirements of GPLv3. The proper phrasing should be that Microsoft is very cautious with respect to the GPL, because it believes that the GPL works as it says it does, and it wishes to make sure that it is not put into a situation where mixing of GPLed code with their own code arises, when that code is not something they wish to make free software. When they judge that releasing code under the GPL is warranted, they do so. This was true of UNIX services for Windows, and it is true now. _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
