Re: polarization

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

bruce perens com (Bruce Perens) writes: 
> IMO it would be easier for many corporations to license the patent and then
> fight to sever that clause of the GPL. Especially if the people with the
> patent have a large legal budget, and the people behind the GPL do not.
> 

Then how would any community people work on the software?  They would
have to start doing all the work themselves. They would basically
demonstrate to the world that open source doesn't work, shut down the
open source nature of the project, make Microsoft's claim that open
source is fragmented become true, and ensure our loss to
Microsoft. Companies are not stupid. This would be a really stupid
idea.

And in Red Hat's specific case, of course the GPL is the only reason
proprietary companies can't take Linux and eat our lunch, so we aren't
going to be undermining it and in fact require it to continue to be
enforced.

I think this is a scare scenario, not a real scenario.

Havoc