In its antitrust settlement with the Justice Department and nine states, Microsoft promised to publish technology that would allow competing products to interoperate with Windows. But Microsoft has sidestepped the penalty by crafting a technology license that excludes the company's only viable competitor.

What should you do if you aren't happy about Microsoft escaping an antitrust penalty? Don't be passive about it. Since Microsoft hates the GPL so much, give them more of it to contend with: Deploy systems like GNU/Linux as Web servers and other infrastructure, and consider Mozilla, OpenOffice and Evolution for the desktop. Look around for software projects that you can place under the GPL: internal tools, research work, products that you built and then didn't sell--and get your employer to release them

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