The Members Forum

It's not a huge secret that Microsoft hates the entire idea behind open source software. It thinks it's a monster that creates free products that erode Microsoft's commercial offerings.

The company can tolerate many of these packages, such as Open Office, because they are simply not as good as the Microsoft product and the company knows that people who use something like Open Office will often migrate to Microsoft Office when they can either afford to do it or must do it.

Of course, when it suits Microsoft, it will use various chunks of open source code as needed. Microsoft notoriously lifted the TCP/IP operational code from the Open Source BSD-Unix product to get Windows NT to work right on the Internet. From what I can tell, it still uses code derived from that original stack. Even if Microsoft managed to recode from scratch, it is still sensible about bits and pieces of code they might find useful.

Commercial companies lifting open source code and putting it in commercial products is the probably the main reason that the newest General Public License (GPL) are so onerous regarding open source code. In essence, it says that if you use any GPL code, then the resultant code created or derived will also be Open Source and bound by the same GPL.

BSD has its own license which says you can do whatever you want with the code. But this sort of thing is becoming the exception to the rule.

PC Mag has the details HERE!