Comments about Microsoft and the GPL

[Russell Harrison]

On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 8:51 AM, Paul W. Frields<stickster at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think it's quite simple for Microsoft to say, "We still don't like
> the GPL, but because these drivers will help our customers, and
> because this license is required to get them in the kernel, we've done
> it."  Certainly there are places in Microsoft that are open to
> thinking constructively about open source and how it fits into their
> business and customer engagements.  But I think trying to cast it as a
> philosophical sea change is wishful thinking.

That's my thinking as well.  Virtualization is the big buzzword these
days and MS obviously wants a piece of that pie.  They've correctly
realized that people will want to run Linux guests on their hypervisor
and probably found that they didn't get the same performance from
Linux VMs that other hypervisors do.  Solution, write some drivers to
fix the performance issues with emulated hardware and get them into
Linux.  I honestly think its as simple as that.  No evil master plan,
or benevolent change of heart.  Just plain pragmatism.

What I do find interesting is that they seem to be going about things
properly.  By getting their drivers accepted into the upstream kernel
they've avoided the huge maintenance burden incurred by maintaining
closed source kernel modules for every platform they need to support.
This way they'll know that every distro coming out after the drivers
are merged upstream should work properly.  nVidia, Broadcom etc.
should probably take some notes.

Would this be a message we could work with from this announcement?

Russell