Can you not see the problem here?
Yes, actually I can, and it is a good point. This is exactly what we need:
Thinking through the situation and forseeing its outcomes, not impassioned
moaning about Microsoft and lawyers.
There are plusses and minuses to the MS license and the only good way to
evaluate them is to lay them out calmly and see what adds up.
Make up an itemized list of the bad consequences you forsee from the MS license
and present it to the ietf-mxcomp mailing list. Make it well organized and
well reasoned and it will be a positive contribution to their process.
Open source has a lot of benefits, I use a lot of open source programs myself
and have written a couple of very minor ones. If you read a bit of history
though, you find that in the days before intellectual property law, things were
a free for all. Theft of inventions, publications, etc. was rampant. Peoples
lives were ruined when the work of years was stolen from them. Inventors,
authors, artists, etc. labored in obsessive secrecy in order to protect
themselves. Microsoft and the other supposed villians of the computer age are
pikers compared to the IP thieves of old. IP law has a lot of good outcomes.
It isn't wise to throw it all out the window or to insist that you can never
compromise with it.
Mark Holm