Well, as more-or-less promised, I have a closing word on the recent RMS saga (previously logged in entries 'stallman' and 'stallman2'). I wasn't able to directly compare the original version of Richard's comments with his revised version, but a visual inspection suggests that only the paragraph about which I (and others) complained was modified. The revised version of that paragraph looks like so.

No license can stop Microsoft from practicing "embrace and extend" if they are determined to do so at all costs. If they write their own program from scratch, and use none of our code, the license on our code does not affect them. But a total rewrite is costly and hard, and even Microsoft can't do it all the time. Hence their campaign to persuade us to abandon the license that protects our community, the license that won't let them say, "What's yours is mine, and what's mine is mine." They want us to let them take whatever they want, without ever giving anything back. They want us to abandon our defenses.

Well, I'm certainly satisfied that the first half of that paragraph addresses the misconception that any kind of software license can protect against embrace and extend, but I'm a little less than persuaded by the latter half. If total rewrites are as costly and hard as RMS suggests, then why did Microsoft reimplement Kerberos (as RMS pointed out in his curt response to my email) rather than modify the existing code? They would have been perfectly within their legal rights to utilise the existing code base without offering anything in return, and yet they chose to reimplement. RMS might be correct in a general sense about the price of reimplementation, but the example in hand works against rather than for his explanation.

I have a somewhat different theory about the Microsoft attitude to the GPL. I think they fear the GPL because they fear that they will be trapped by it someday. Microsoft's culture is an extremely proprietary one: they guard their intellectual property with the covetousness of a dragon guarding its treasure hoard. I think they fear that someday some careless employee will incorporate tainted GPL code into a program, and they may then be obliged to share some of their treasure. Horrors! The old dragon wants to keep all of its treasure and acquire more at every opportunity, and the idea that this GPL code is out there with the intention of making them part with it is anathema to them.

I think that RMS is operating under a misapprehension if he sincerely thinks that the GPL is any realistic kind of defence against Microsoft. Given that it can't defend against embrace and extend, then what exactly does it defend against? Stallman uses the GPL as a tool of obstruction, not defence. (The GPL can be used in a defensive mode, but Stallman doesn't use it that way.) He wants the GPL to be a stumbling block to Microsoft: if they won't play by his rules, he wants it to be hard for them to gain any benefit from his code. Microsoft isn't intimidated by such defences, really, but they are appalled that a tool like the GPL can exist at all -- a tool the intent of which is to force them to share their hoard.

This, I think, is what Allchin meant when he called the GPL "un-American". Allchin is living in the Gordon Gekko Wall Street world of "greed is good". If greed is good, then Microsoft is a saint and the GPL is a tool of the devil, since its raison d'être is to enforce sharing, not selfishness. I think that Allchin was being entirely sincere, and that the concept of sharing intellectual property (as a good in its own right, as opposed to a means to the end of acquiring more property) evokes revulsion in members of the Microsoft subculture. The concept of being under a legal obligation to share, as the GPL would have it, must grate against every virtual fibre of their corporate being.

To put it another way, the "American way" (as I imagine Allchin sees it) is to be able to do as one damn well pleases with one's own property; to have an inalienable right to be selfish, or not, as one chooses. The GPL would take that choice from you (for the greater good). Microsoft have no problem with people choosing to give away their property if they want to do that, but the concept of revoking their divine right to be selfish with their own property, as and when they please, is appalling.