Bruce Perens

“ An entire industry has been built around Free Software, and is growing rapidly despite an unfavorable market. The success of software companies like Red Hat, and the benefits to vendors such as Dell and IBM, demonstrate that Free Software is not at all incompatible with business.
The Free Software license singled out for abuse by Microsoft is the GNU General Public License, or GNU GPL. This license is the computer equivalent of share and share alike. But this does not mean, as Microsoft claims, that a company using these programs is legally obliged to make all its software and data free. ”

“ There is much software that is essential to a business, but which does not differentiate that business from its competitors. Even companies that have not fully embraced the Open Source model can justify collaboration on Free Software projects for this non-differentiating software, because of the money they will save. And such collaborations are often overwhelmingly successful: for example, the project that produces the market-leading Apache web server was started by a group of users who agreed to share the work of maintaining a piece of software that each of their businesses depended on. ”

“ A number of the free software evangelists, in informal discussion, felt that the proper response to Microsoft would be to stand together. Mundie's speech shows that Microsoft's strategy is to keep us divided and attack us one at a time, until all are gone. ”

“ But Free Software is also directly in the user's interest, because it means that the users control the software they use. When they do business with Open Source vendors, the vendors do not dominate them. ”

“ The success of the Open Source model arises from copyright holders relaxing their control in exchange for more and better collaboration. Developers allow their software to be freely redistributed and modified, asking only for the same privileges in return. ”

“ With very little funding, the GNU/Linux system has become a significant player in many major markets, from Internet servers to embedded devices. Our GUI desktop projects have astounded the software industry by going from zero to being comparable with or superior to others in only 4 years. ”

“ Many more people find themselves in violation of Microsoft licenses, because Microsoft doesn't allow copying, modification, and redistribution as the GPL does. Microsoft license violations have resulted in civil suits and imprisonment. Accidental GPL violations are easily remedied, and rarely get to court. ”