Do you have anything to back this up other than it being your knee-jerk reaction?

Microsoft's entire leadership has turned over and it's easy to see that their culture is very different from the days you're talking about.

Also, they don't have a monopoly on nearly anything and certainly not on Javascript engines. They couldn't move to the "Extend, Extinguish" phases even if they wanted to.

Not saying i agree, but we consider history for every decision made. Want to loan someone money? consider their credit rating. Want to hire someone? consider their employment record.

Microsoft has a long history of not being so nice when they have an advantage. How much of that is leadership driven, and how much is built into the corporate culture and structure? It's knee-jerk, but it's not crazy to think about.

> Want to loan someone money? consider their credit rating. Want to hire someone? consider their employment record.

That's a single person. Microsoft is many thousands of people, and the most important decision makers have changed. In your analogy, you're considering whether to loan money to an almost completely different person.

Those same decision frequently had hiring and promotion authority. How different are these new people? Are they someone the old decision makers promoted minutes before leaving or are they fresh new hires? Chances are there is a complex mix and at least some of microsoft's behavior has changed and some will remain the same.

> some of microsoft's behavior has changed and some will remain the same

That's the exact argument I was making. The analogy doesn't work because this is, literally, a new Microsoft. It has new leadership. You can't use the past as a benchmark for how this company will behave because no one really knows what parts of the company's behavior and culture have changed and what parts haven't.

> Microsoft's entire leadership has turned over and it's easy to see that their culture is very different from the days you're talking about.

Yes. They made a 180° turn already. Who says they won't do another?

Customer lock-in isn't Bill Gates' idea. It's a very tempting strategy that you can find virtually everywhere where companies think it'll gain them money.

Even at the MOST EVIL Time of Microsoft some parts of Microsoft were very PRO Open Source even while they said "Linux is Cancer."

Big Corporations can have mixed messages. Apple (My most hated company in Tech has also been very good to Open Source with some projects)

I'm genuinely curious which projects you are thinking of when you mention Apple. Shedding GPLv3 and refusing to (for example) update Bash because they do not want to use anything licensed under GPLv3 is pretty.... I dunno, I'm just curious what projects you're thinking of when you say that. The walls of that garden are pretty high.

So getting rid of GPLv3 means they can't be doing anything good in open source? Nevermind CUPS, LLVM, Swift, and WebKit just to name a few?

GPL isn't the only license in town, and clearly there are disadvantages to it.

What "disadvantage" are you referring to? The one that forces companies to give back in the same manner that allows them to use the work of others for free? Yeah, that is so shitty.

The problem is that you need to give back everything, even if the GPL code you are using is a tiny part of your product. That's why I prefer LGPL.

Or Samba. When given the choice to abide by the GPL and open source their Samba changes, or to drop everything; they did the latter and wrote their own SMB implementation. That was three or four OSX releases ago and it's still buggy as hell. The only one who lost here are Apple's paying customers.

Have to agree, had a lot of pain when they first switched, their initial release/update was broken/poor to say the least.. the hangs and performance issues aside even.

Swift comes to mind.

Oh, you mean the language Apple created to make their fucking painful app development process easier?

Chill out. Of course they made it to benefit themselves in some way. They are not a charity.

The point is, they released it as open-source, which is what we are talking about in this thread.

> Also, they don't have a monopoly on nearly anything

They didn't have a monopoly on spreedsheets or word processors in the early 90s either..

It is licensed under MIT. Good luck with that third step...

MIT doesn't necessarily protect you against patent claims, just thought you should know that. The Apache license is much better in this regard.

What patent claim would void the MIT grant?

The MIT license grant subsumes all other restrictions and gives explicit permission to deal.

Wouldn't it be far easier with MIT than GPL? The BSD license sure did little to keep the open source roots of Mac OS thriving.

I thought that had less to do with the choice of license and more to do with the fact that Apple just bundles the zipped source and publishes it every year or so (in contrast to Swift where you can see every commit made since the beginning of the project).

It could help Microsoft close source THEIR implementation later down the line, but it doesn't help them "extinguish" it completely, particularly if third parties wish to maintain it.

MIT makes it easy to fork and relatively easy to re-license.

IANAL but AFAIK as long as they are the sole owner and contributor or has agreements in place with everyone the GPL doesn't protect us against going closed in future releases.

What it does secure is you right to fork the last open source version. Then again, so does BSD, MIT and ASL - and under better terms for everyone else.

The copyright holder can license a work under any license at any time. Although you can obviously issue an exclusive license for example, in most countries you can not simply dissolve the copyright (there is no concept of assigning something to the public domain). So practically, there is no way to write a license that stops the copyright holder from issuing a new and different license.

What the GPL does is forbid anyone who is not the copyright holder from changing the license. If you make a derived work from something and wish to use the GPL as the means for allowing you to make that derived work, then you must use the GPL.

The "better terms" that more permissive licenses give you is the ability to change the license when you make a derived work. Of course someone can fork the original open source version, but this is only useful if that person: 1) knows about it 2) has access to it 3) can build and install it for their platform. In many cases, more permissive licenses are preferred because vendors know that they can provide digital locks on the platforms that stop people from deploying free (as in freedom) versions. They wish to get the benefit of open source development, but still lock their users out of certain functionality.

Permissive licenses are useful, but they are not automatically better for everyone in every circumstance. Certainly I have a lot of useless bricks that used to be useful consumer electronics because my vendor doesn't let me upgrade them. Strangely the best piece of consumer hardware I ever bought was a bicycle navigation unit from Sony. GPL from top to bottom and they even gave you instructions on how to rebuild it and deploy it.

Does it matter? It certainly does to me. YMMV.

You may be interested in some thought experiments I'm running to try and achieve the aims of a verifiable public domain dedication under existing US law:

https://github.com/berneout

I'm also of the view that a truly irrevocable copyright waiver/dedication isn't currently possible under US law. We're not alone:

http://www.rosenlaw.com/lj16.htm

But you should be aware that others take a different view, if you're not already:

https://cr.yp.to/publicdomain.html

The most interesting reading I've done is probably the old CC mailing list threads on CC0-1.0's backup license. If you set yourself the goal of writing international/portable language, things get really hairy.

Even if companies had been able to fork IE6, it would not have changed anything.

(Companies are able to fork WebKit, and yet it's on a good track to become the new IE6, because Apple doesn't care and their market share force everyone to work around bugs in iOS/OSX Safari.)

Which makes building a community the most important thing to do, to make it harder to keep closed forks closed. It's worked really well for LLVM/clang, with contributions coming from a number of normally open-source hostile sources. Conversely, were Microsoft's engine here GPLed, with the contributor licensing agreements open source organizations like Canonical and the FSF have, it would be a lot easier for them to close things back up, and take all the toys with them.