“Certainly one could take Microsoft to task for the ethics of
taking an open standard and turning it proprietary. But why it was
done, to me, is neither as interesting nor as genuine a source of
concern as how it was done or how it can be prevented in the
future.”
“You see, the Kerberos code that Microsoft “enhanced” is
distributed under a BSD-style license similar to the one used by
XFree86. This is the kind of license that generally allows
anyone who legally obtains the source code to make modifications
without requiring such modifications themselves to be open. Indeed,
the copyright file that comes in the current Kerberos code
explicitly says:”
“
Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute
this software and its documentation for any purpose and without fee
is hereby granted.
”
“In contrast, the GNU Public License, under which Linux and most
of its tools are distributed, requires that all modifications must
be as open as the original code.”