Chris Pratley on Patents, GPL, and Microsoft

Chris has a great post mainly discussing pattents and GPL. Highly recommended reading.

“Some people asked about how I feel towards open source, and more specifically how I would feel if someone created a word processor that implemented all of the ideas of Microsoft Word.

Well, open source has many flavors. To the extent that open source is about people working together, contributing their time and effort to build something, I think its great. That's what I do all day too after all. In the case of open source, the contributors may or may not get paid for their work - that's a personal choice on their part (just as it is personal choice for me to give some of the money I earn to charity). Because some people choose to give to a community in this way doesn’t make their activity any more virtuous than those who choose to give in another way in my mind. ...“

[1] http://weblogs.asp.net/Chris_Pratley/archive/2004/05/01/124586.aspx