Today I heard the best single presentation on open-source and free software I have ever personally attended, in a talk by Columbia Professor of Law Eben Moglen, on the topic “Copyleft Capitalism: GPLv3 and the Future of Software Innovation.” He spoke for over 90 minutes. I understand the session was recorded, and I have asked that a transcript be prepared. I write the rest of this post based on the notes I took during his extraordinary talk.
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Microsoft failed in that, as a monopoly, it has for the first time failed to produce a new version that will get the old version out of the market.
Vista has doomed them, as Microsoft is now competing with itself, trying to displace Windows with Vista.
He then said the real problem was to limit the damage when Microsoft fails, how to get “out from under” Microsoft as they enter the end game, perhaps by paroxisms of litigation.
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Eben then related how he had finessed the famed “coupons” in the Microsoft/Novell brouhaha, describing how he had “hacked” Novell.
Image from Wikimedia
The GPL, as far as I know, is the only free software licence that has been tested in court, and it's used by more software projects than all other free software licences combined. This gives it's writers a lot of information with which to do bug fixing, and it gives the GPL a massive responsibility to work solidly.