Is Free Software a Good Thing?

(NSDQ: MSFT)
It's bad enough that Microsoft is threatening to sue the independents who are creating open source software. But what's hard to take is their belief that you cannot create your own scripts without stealing Microsoft code for your project. At the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco, one show organizer took revenge. Remember, Linux was well established while MS was still working out of a garage.

Jonathan Corbet, the man in question, said in a panel at the Conference in San Francisco last May:

"I feel I've been called a thief," he said levelly during a panel at the event, and pointed out that Microsoft was one of the companies that had patented "thousands of trivial functions ... There's no way to write a nontrivial program that can't be claimed to infringe on someone's patents."

What MS doesn't want you to know is that there is a lot of open source code floating around their programs.

This is an old - old - argument. Open source and corporations have been arguing over ownership of code for generations. There are millions of dollars of stolen code floating through corporate America.

Programmers can identify their work because they may put their babies birth date, or the first date they kissed their husband, into the code. They are always finding code being sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars that contains their code - but gives them no credit.

This could be one reason why Vista won't let so many software programs work on their system. This limits the number of open source software you can use if you have Vista.

What does this mean for us? Open Source doesn't mean second hand, not good enough, or second rate quality. It does mean 'free for public use.'

I use some open source and free software. Most of Google's toolbar tools are open source and donated.

If you want to try out some open source software programs then visit:

http://www.opensourcewindows.org/
http://www.tucows.com/