MS 'loves' open source, not GPL, Mar 05, 2002

He said GPL-based companies were low-margin manufacturing firms that did not have the ability to charge for software. While Microsoft was able to invest a large amount of profits in research and development, GPL businesses had little to re-invest because they had to rely on selling documents and support around their software.

Is the clock finally ticking for the Linux desktop? Is anyone even watching the clock? That's a tough call when Linux's raucous true believers turned up the volume of rants following recent criticism by my colleague David Coursey.

Linux no longer falls into the "new innovations" category, but it does illustrate a point about the importance of money in big business. Without monetary backing, a product has little chance of gaining widespread notoriety.

Attempts by the Free Software Foundation to turn NuSphere Corp and MySQL AB's contract dispute into a legal test case for the GNU general public license (GPL) seem to have fallen at the first hurdle as the judge hearing the case declined to consider technical arguments.

For the past month -- and for the next 500 days or so -- Free Radio Linux will transmit a computerized reading of the Linux operating system.

"We really wanted to develop something which was transparently about audio on the Internet, which is why we came up with Free Radio Linux ," said Adam Hyde, one of the website's creators. "What we thought we would do is build a speech bot that would read out the entire Linux source code, live over the Internet."

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