Microsoft Contributes Linux Drivers to Linux Community
microsoft.com
microsoft.com
Seriously: this is something that should be expected. This is the only license they would use to license Linux kernel drivers that allow Linux to run better under Hyper-V. It's not out of kindness but of forcedly enlightened self-interest.
It's likely a response to some heavyweight clients saying: "Look... We use Windows here, but those Linux servers won't go away and they run like crap under your Hyper-V thing. Fix it or we will run VMWare, Xen or something else"
Idealistic fantasy? I have no sense of what % of the market are dual-booters/VM users. Businesses that use MS – they won’t, IMO, switch to Linux any time soon. From the trial of windows 7, it seems like a promising OS. With me, avoiding MS is more a matter of not wanting to support their controlling business practices.
This seems viable to me. Anyone agree?
They're giving themselves a lot of credit for releasing drivers that only support their product.
I can imagine a team within LCA (the MSFT legal department) worked long and hard on this project -- quite possibly more work as a legal exercise than as a development one.
"Because there are no further agreed-upon promises, no reciprocal obligations. It would be a contract if I said to the owner of a pond: if you give me a license to fish in this pond, I'll give you half of all the fish I catch. In that scenario, each of us has voluntarily entered into a kind of promise. We each give the other something of value, so if I get the license and then I don't give over half of all my catch of the day, the pond owner can sue me for not living up to the terms of the contract."
This makes no sense to me. Why is it "It would be a contract if I said to the owner of a pond: if you give me a license to fish in this pond, I'll give you half of all the fish I catch." and not "It would be a contract if I said to the owner of a pond: if you give me a license to fish in this pond, I'll give you ten bucks." ??
A contract, on the other hand, is a forward looking document. It's based on the idea that you'll reach an agreement and something of value will be exchanged to seal the deal (which is why you hear of contracts for $1), but that the exchange will be incomplete until some time later.
For example, if you buy a concert ticket, your transaction with the vendor ends as soon as you receive the ticket, but the ticket itself is (typically) a kind of contract between the holder and the promoter, who promises to stage the event and provide admission to all ticket holders or refund the face value.
I don't know of large damages being awarded for violations of the GPL. Is there must history of this?
I would have thought Microsoft could write a replacement in house while their lawyers stall, then they would pay a fine quite small compared to their issues with proprietary IP, such as double space.
And as we see from the ffmpeg hall of shame, binary releases of wrongly-distributed GPL'd code often leave telltale strings in the binary. If you'd go to enough effort to obsfucate the binary effectively (not just strings) for every possible source file, why not just write it yourself?
how could that possibly happen? microsoft is still the copyright owner on the code, they can use it however they want. they can release it again under a different license or use it in their own products under no license at all.
the worst that could happen in this case is the gpl proves to not be legally binding and someone else is able to use microsoft's gpl code in their own product without releasing the code.
Secondly, what they've done is to contribute code to the linux kernel, under the GPL, in order to improve linux in a way that plays to their commercial advantage. Which is, after all, what the vast majority of corporate linux contributions are about.
The fact that his particular contribution happens to be obviously tactical rather than the more strategic aims of some of the bigger corporate backers doesn't mean that it isn't exactly what we want to see, and entirely in the spirit of commercial open source contributions.
If I ever meet any of the people at Microsoft who made this happen at a conference, I have every intention of buying them a beer to say thanks - enlightened self interest is almost always the best way to motivate a corporation to do something useful and I'd imagine the path to making MSFT's self interest sufficiently enlightened to see the advantage of funding this has been a hard one. Well done, guys!
But MS using GPL was a big news for me.
It's a nice gesture, but for all I know about Hyper-V (which admittedly is very little), it's a deliberate strategy with an ulterior motive.
edit: After some quick reading on Wikipedia, I'm more convinced that what I said above is true.
Almost like they're a business or something. ;)
http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecm...
The entire spec for .NET including the CLR and C# are under ECMA's control, rather than Microsoft's. And MS is actively supporting the Mono project.
I'm not claiming that they're doing it out of altruism, but rather that they're seeing the value in supporting open source. It just took them longer than it did for others ;)
Tangentially related to the release of the drivers I suppose, but the article was fresh in my mind.