Letter from Ralph Nader ... regarding the USDOJ/Microsoft proposed settlement, Nov 10, 2001

The overall acceptance of Microsoft's limits on the sharing of technical information to the broader public is an important and in our view core flaw in the proposed agreement. The agreement should require that this information be as freely available as possible, with a high burden on Microsoft to justify secrecy. Indeed, there is ample evidence that Microsoft is focused on strategies to cripple the free software movement, which it publicly considers an important competitive threat. This is particularly true for software developed under the GNU Public License (GPL), which is used in GNU/Linux, the most important rival to Microsoft in the server market.

Apache 2.0 is based on a new structure that allows faster performance in some cases, by allowing the software to answer Web page requests by initiating a new program job called a "thread." This job is less taxing than the earlier requirement of a more complicated "process." The new version also works better on Windows computers than the current version, which is geared for Unix and Linux systems.

Talking about collaborative software, VA Linux has announced version 3.0 of SourceForge, which will be generally available from next week. VA Linux used to be a hardware vendor but as more and more of the 800lb gorillas started to offer Linux support on their hardware platforms, VA Linux quickly saw that hardware was not the route to fame and riches but more likely to famine and rags and it is no longer in that market.

Knowing how proprietary software can be used by unruly software companies -- either by its creators or by other proprietary developers -- to stifle competing software, Stallman has been diligent about making sure that open-source companies only advocate open-source software.

According to a post within the GNOME-foundation mailing list, Stallman wrote to the two individuals responsible for preparing the GNOME summary, Christian Schaller and Steve George, and asked them to "stop all mentions of non-free software in the GNOME summaries."

Along with Microsoft and Guardent, security companies @Stake, Bindview, Foundstone and Internet Security Systems also supported the announcement, Schwartz said. The formal announcement for the group is expected within a month, and more partners would be added, he said.

"You either participate in the Responsible Disclosure Forum, or you're a black hat bent on being malicious. End of story," he wrote in the introduction to the guidelines. "Too much money, too many individuals and too much of the world's communication rely on responsible disclosure for it to be continued to be seen as a discussion worth debating."

In remarks at a Microsoft stockholders' meeting, Bill Gates recently claimed that Microsoft was responsible for the success of open source.

As an exercise in retroactive imperialism, this is little short of breathtaking. It ignores the fact that though the open-source culture wouldn't get public visibility until after 1993, or a name for itself until 1998, it already existed well before the foundation of Microsoft in 1975. Many of today's most active hackers can readily remember a time when the typical response to the word "Microsoft" was "Who are they?" -- and some of our most important work (such as the Berkeley TCP/IP stack that Microsoft itself copied and used) was written years before the computing landscape flattened into PCs as far as the eye can see.

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