[Jim sent me this reply to his op-ed piece. Previous Politech message: http://www.politechbot.com/p-04007.html --Declan] -----Original Message----- From: Mark Webbink [mailto:mwebbinkat_private] Sent: Thursday, September 19, 2002 5:50 PM To: James V. Delong Subject: Re: CEI's Weekly Commentary: Software Wars And, John, you have missed as well. You make the all too common mistake of implying that anything associated with GPL'd software will be "infected" by the GPL, and that just isn't true. Ask Oracle. Ask IBM. Ask Veritas. Ask BEA. Ask SAP. All of them are running their proprietary applications on Linux now. The only thing that held them back (and which continues to hold other proprietary application vendors back even now) was waiting until they saw enough demand to justify porting their software to run on an open source backbone. They now see that demand. While many in the open source community would love to see the day when all software is open source, they really are not holding a gun to anyone's head. They do believe, as do we at Red Hat, that if you take the benefit of open source software to develop or enhance your software, you ought to contribute your developments and enhancements back to the community. That's the way the open source community thrives. You have to keep in mind, a proprietary operating system vendor is not going to even give you the choice of using its source code without extracting something back. Mark Webbink Sr. Vice President and General Counsel Red Hat, Inc. P.S. Thanks for making your content free for all to read. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Like Politech? Make a donation here: http://www.politechbot.com/donate/ Recent CNET News.com articles: http://news.search.com/search?q=declan CNET Radio 9:40 am ET weekdays: http://cnet.com/broadband/0-7227152.html -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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