Craig Mundie
Craig Mundie is chief technical officer of advanced strategies and policy at
Microsoft. Mundie has repeatedly been accused of spreading
FUD by people in the
open source and
free software community. In a
May 3,
2001 speech, Mundie claimed:
- Some of the most successful OSS technology is licensed under the GNU General Public License or GPL. The GPL mandates that any software that incorporates source code already licensed under the GPL will itself become subject to the GPL. When the resulting software product is distributed, its creator must make the entire source code base freely available to everyone, at no additional charge. This viral aspect of the GPL poses a threat to the intellectual property of any organization making use of it. It also fundamentally undermines the independent commercial software sector because it effectively makes it impossible to distribute software on a basis where recipients pay for the product rather than just the cost of distribution.
Both
Richard Stallman and
Linus Torvalds have responded critically to Mundie's speech.
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