The folks at Ars Technica write:
Microsoft funds questionable study attacking GPL 3 draft process“A study (PDF) funded by Microsoft and carried out by Harvard Business School professor Alan MacCormack aims to determine what kind of features and protections developers want in version 3 of the widely-used General Public License (GPL 3) … The study, which uses extremely questionable methodology, concludes that open-source software developers don’t want the GPL 3 to impose extensive patent licensing requirements or prevent agreements like the controversial cross-licensing deal between Novell and Microsoft. “
So, we now know what Bob Muglia is talking about when he told Interop attendees that “Customers have indicated to us that it’s problematic to them that when they work with open-source software that they don’t have similar intellectual property protection.” (See that story here: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/052307-interop-microsoft-says-licensing-protects.html)
I suppose if you commission a study, you’ll get the comments you want from customers and you can then use that to justify whatever actions you already wanted to take. Nice, huh?
