It started with Jim Allchin of Microsoft talking about the GNU GPL being "un-American" (a term he intended to be pejorative). It was further fuelled by Microsoft's Senior VP Craig Mundie spreading some FUD about open source and IP ownership. I've been trying not to comment on all this, as comments have been in surplus and I'd just be Microsoft-bashing again, but now I find that I have approximately three distinct comments to make on the matter, so I hereby loose my fingers on the keyboard to rant.

Point number one is that Microsoft is tapping a real vein of fear here. We're living in an age where people are particularly selfish and jealous of their property, no matter how worthless that property is or how dubious it is to refer to it as "property" anyhow. I'll go on record here as saying that most "intellectual property" out there is worthless. As a teenager learning how to hack BASIC, I would gleefully copyright all my programs just to assert my ownership. In actual fact, it probably would have been better for me and society as a whole if I'd put them in the public domain and submitted them to a hobbyist magazine for publication (this was the 1980s, folks). Most "intellectual property" in existence falls into the same category, but that doesn't stop people hoarding it and jealously guarding it. The GPL says, "share!", but most people behave like a spoiled two-year-old about it and don't want to share. Microsoft is tapping that social undercurrent in their present FUD campaign. They behave like the corporate equivalent of a spoiled two-year-old most of the time anyhow, so it might not be an act.

In a similar vein, the legal obligation to share that is created under the terms of the GPL is easy to paint as "communist" (another pejorative). Richard Stallman has written a few words about how it's not at all like that, but he misses the point. The point is that the GPL shares the same principles as some sort of idealistic communism, and everybody knows that communism is both evil and a failure. The GPL's "share!" requirement means that you don't get exclusive control over your work if you add to a GPL project, and that whole concept of other people having a right to use your work without your say drives most born-again capitalists up the wall and into a chorus of "commie!" at short notice.

Some people are so intimidated by this requirement to share that they fear far more than the GPL could possibly enforce. I'm pretty sure that some people are under the impression that the GPL is a trap waiting to take all their intellectual property rights and give them to a big commune of long-haired pinko Stallman-worshiping hippie hackers, or something like that. They fear that stuff created using GPLed tools might be subject to the GPL, or that all their work might be tainted by the GPL virus if they let any of it in. There's some slight validity (slight, mind you) to the latter fear, but the former is based (to borrow from Douglas Adams) on three things: ignorance, stupidity, and nothing else.

But never let the facts get in the way of a good FUD campaign, and according to the last paragraph of an article in The Register, Microsoft have now claimed "clarity of Intellectual Property Ownership" as a feature in one of their products. Ha! Pardon the Zero Wing reference, but all your base are belong to Microsoft. Microsoft make it very clear that they own their Intellectual property, it's true, and if your intellectual property (such as your documents, your in-house programs, and other lifeblood parts of your business) happens to depend on Microsoft's intellectual property, then you are facing a far greater peril than anything the GPL can offer: Microsoft has you over a barrel. Perhaps open source software should have a similar list of compelling features including "immunity from vendor lock-in".