At 12:19 PM 2/15/2002, Sylvain Petreolle wrote:
Time of reinventing the wheel in every program is over
Exactly the opposite is true. When the (L)GPL is stamped onto code, every commercial programmer must reinvent the wheel rather than using it. Many of these programmers work for small businesses that are trying to compete with behemoths such as Microsoft, and will not have the resources to survive if they must reimpelement. Microsoft, however, has virtually infinite resources and thus CAN reimplement whatever it wants. Microsoft is not hurt; its competitors are.
The (L)GPL is Microsoft's best friend. That's why the company sent a representative to the O'Reilly Open Source Conference last year to say negative things about those licenses. Microsoft knew very well that this would incite the somewhat fanatical proponents of these licenses to generate more code under them, killing the competition. An execellent example of reverse psychology at work.
--Brett