O’Reilly Network: Tim O’Reilly: Shuttle Diplomacy Between Allchin and Stallman

[ Thanks to S.Ramaswamy for this link.
]

“The GNU GPL and the American Way, Richard Stallman’s response
to Jim Allchin’s recent comments on government support for open
source, is a wonderful piece of writing that clearly articulates
the values of the free software movement.”

“I really like what Richard has to say, and certainly have
many reservations about some of Microsoft’s business practices, but
at the same time, I have been disappointed by how quick members of
the free software and open source communities have been to assume
the worst in Jim’s remarks. As Tevye says in Fiddler on the
Roof, if we live by an “eye for an eye and a tooth for a
tooth…before long, the whole world will be blind and
toothless.”

“I met for two hours with Jim Allchin last Friday, because I
wanted to ask him face to face what he meant, and read his body
language to see if this was a calculated course of FUD on the part
of Microsoft, as many people have concluded, or a legitimate
misunderstanding of a few remarks taken out of context. I persuaded
Jim to let me tape part of our conversation, and I’ll be publishing
it later this week, after I have a chance to have the tape
transcribed. However, that will take a few days, and I wanted to
share some of what I observed while this issue is still hot. One
quick way to do that is to publish a couple of the comments I sent
to Richard after reviewing a draft of his response.”

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