[Am-info] interview with MS software engineer

[Roy Bixler]

I found the following interview with a Microsoft software engineer

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=314

to be ... representative.  I doubt Bill Gates himself could have said
it better.

Apart from that, the most notable is the fear of the GNU General
Public Licence, as shown here:

    We of course have a policy on GPL code: we can't look at it.  What
    is the reason for this?  Well, in my read of the GPL it states
    that if a work includes GPL code, or is derived from GPL code,
    then the GPL applies to the aggregate work.  And it is very hard
    to discern between which ideas are completely yours, and which are
    influenced by code you have seen in the past. What this means is
    that by incorporating, or possibly even reading GPL code, you are
    placing your own IP in jeopardy.  It seems to me that anyone
    producing commercial code should be very careful about the
    implications of the GPL on their dev processes.

Of course, this might only be indirection (i.e. FUD) as the transition
he makes from talking about using actual code to just using an idea is
a bit suspect.

By the way, I found this from Linux Today

http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-11-20-010-20-IN-MS

where there is also a discussion forum.  Here, someone named Case
Roole muses that this article explains why Microsoft never tries to
employ anyone who's actively worked on GPL code.  Well, except maybe
for Linux kernel hacker Alan Cox.

R.