FC: Red Hat lawyer replies to CEI on Linux suitability

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

[Jim sent me this reply to his op-ed piece. Previous Politech message: 
http://www.politechbot.com/p-04007.html --Declan]


-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Webbink [mailto:mwebbink () redhat com]
Sent: Thursday, September 19, 2002 5:50 PM
To: James V. Delong
Subject: Re: CEI's Weekly Commentary: Software Wars


And, John, you have missed as well. You make the all too common mistake
of implying that anything associated with GPL'd software will be
"infected" by the GPL, and that just isn't true. Ask Oracle. Ask IBM.
Ask Veritas. Ask BEA. Ask SAP. All of them are running their proprietary
applications on Linux now. The only thing that held them back (and which
continues to hold other proprietary application vendors back even now)
was waiting until they saw enough demand to justify porting their
software to run on an open source backbone. They now see that demand.

While many in the open source community would love to see the day when
all software is open source, they really are not holding a gun to
anyone's head. They do believe, as do we at Red Hat, that if you take
the benefit of open source software to develop or enhance your software,
you ought to contribute your developments and enhancements back to the
community. That's the way the open source community thrives. You have to
keep in mind, a proprietary operating system vendor is not going to even
give you the choice of using its source code without extracting
something back.

Mark Webbink
Sr. Vice President and General Counsel
Red Hat, Inc.

P.S. Thanks for making your content free for all to read.




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