OneAndOneIs2

I see Intel has just released the previously-commercial-only Threading Building Blocks (TBB) template library under GPL v2.

And this has reminded me of the complications Qt has brought up being v2-only, and it suddenly occurred to me that there's a way MS could bring a really sneaky anti-v3 strategy to bear.

MS has a number of proprietary things that the FOSS world would like to get inter-operable. The NTFS file system. The Office formats. Etc. etc. And the EU has been nagging at them to release interoperability information for ages.

Since MS seems to really dislike GPL v3, they could solve a lot of their problems with a simple move: Release all the code necessary to get interoperability under Linux working. Under GPL v2 only.

Take Samba. Samaba is going GPL v3-only. If MS released some significantly-big v2-patches for the last v2 version that resulted in much better Linux-Windows networking compatibility, a lot of people would use the MS-patched version of Samba: Most end users are more concerned with how well software works than with which license it's released under.

That would leave the Samba team with two choices: Stick with GPL v3 and have a less-popular, less-functional fork of their own software. Or cave in and go back to GPL v2 so they can take advantage of the GPL'd code from MS.

And either way, MS would be able to show to concerned parties, such as the EU antitrust people, that they have finally released the code that the FOSS people have been demanding, under the single most popular FOSS license in use.

That being the case, I think we should look with deep cynicism at any sudden code releases from Microsoft over the coming months... Despite it being a real chore to take code and turn it into a specification that can be used for a clean-room implementation, it would probably be worth doing.