"I'm a strong believer in the Free Software Movement.
All software ought to be free software and distributed under the
terms of the General Public License (GPL). There are solid ethical
and engineering reasons to take that stance. I'm also a strong
believer that growth-oriented, profitable, socially responsible
businesses can be based on free software and do so without any need
for proprietary or even open-source (non-GPL) components. The
simplest argument in favor of this view is to recognize that
proprietary software licenses are largely an accounting convenience
rather than a necessary condition of how software-based businesses
operate.
... The natural way to proceed, then, is to begin engineering
the bulk of our proprietary systems into legacy status and
therefore cooperate across company boundaries to build novel and
superior replacements, distributing those replacements as GPL'd
free software. In other words, let's rebuild our software
infrastructure from scratch, this time under the GPL."
