"You have to understand something about Microsoft employees, lawyers and people in general: they lie.
They also cheat, manipulated, bully and bribe to get ahead.
ANd this isnt simply meaningless rhetoric. If you look through the internal Microsof memos taht have been released in recent court cases as evidence, you can see all the heads of the company from Ballmer/Gates down engage in this behavior.
But its business you might say, that's how things are done everywhere.
Yes, you are right of course."

_________________________________________

Gee don't they wave flags and boast this is the freedom you achive by living in a FREE CAPITALIST nation ?

Meaning: If your smart enought to capitalize on those other people that are not smart enought to lie, cheat, and use every greedy self indulgent means to get rich. You failed as a Capitalist.

So just hush up and keep throwing your money at the sucessful ones . We all know the top 5% have all the money and power and most unsucessful people are too busy worried about beer and ball games after work ,to unite and change these things or it would have been done already!

Why do you think the poor grab guns (war) to defend those rich to keep their riches and positions? Because they can't/won't do it themselves when other suckers will do it for them. A.K.A The same suckers that make them rich.

I agree with Rob above but they do know and understand the limitation of the english word free and its significance.

Free software is libre as in code but free software DOES NOT have to be gratis.

Even the FSF says you can sell your GPLed software (as long as you release the code)

You have to understand something about Microsoft employees, lawyers and people in general: they lie.
They also cheat, manipulated, bully and bribe to get ahead.
ANd this isnt simply meaningless rhetoric. If you look through the internal Microsof memos taht have been released in recent court cases as evidence, you can see all the heads of the company from Ballmer/Gates down engage in this behavior.
But its business you might say, that's how things are done everywhere.
Yes, you are right of course.
But dont forget that gentleman interviewed above does that for a LIVING.
How much do you think he lies every day?
How good do you think he is at it to be where he is now?

Microsoft knows what free software is.

They also know how to lull, destabilize the enemy sort of like when you see some sporting event when an athlete tries to kiss an opponent to try to mess with his head. you might not think much out of it but the desired effect is to get the opponent focused on. In this case, they give a few pieces of gold to some open source project (never a GPL/Free Software one of course), attend conferences where they become the focus, and send in the flavor du jour like Bill Milf and Rajmi to tell us they love us and that deep inside Microsoft there is a growing legion of open source converts who are "Working from the inside but shhhh, we dont want our bald boss to know."
Lots of things to keep you busy and self satisfied until you realize that

NOTHING has changed In Microsoft official stance since the Novell Patent Extortion deal. Nothing.
And by official, I mean what the big boss says not some company toadies. A company's direction is judged by what its head people say, not middle management.
Have you heard anything from Ballmer in the past 2 years which shows any signs of a different stance towards Linux and Free/Libre Software?
No.
Therefore this lawsuit should come as no surprise.

Microsoft gets Free Software and they get the GPL. And they fear it.
They dont fear open source licenses like BSD. (Heck, it served Apple beautifully.)
Its the copyleft that scares the crap out of them. (Well, that and open standards.)

there's always been one idiot in a suit who just doesn't get it.

Today that idiot is called Microsoft.

Does this guy from Vole mean FREE as in beer (i.e. no cost) or FREE as in Freedom?

Sure, RedHat isn't free but they do make the source code freely available to do what you want with it, you're free to alter the code and tinker with it (and you can also download it at no cost). Okay for some it might not be of much use, BUT it means we have distros such as CentOS which are basically Red Hat source code but without the Redhat trademarked stuff.

Rob

As for his comments about Open Source, I agree. Red Hat doesn't give its Server products away for free. Should they do so because it is based on Open Source?

Now lets focus on Apple! ;) Why isn't the iPhone open like Windows CE is for Apps?
They are a bigger gorilla on the issue, lets not just pick on the chimp. He does share his bananas around look at the Windows 7 beta. Apple would never do such a thing with OS X, its too holy.