Bruce Perens, one of the leaders of the free software movement and co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, comments on Microsoft's Craig Mundie and public statements he made about open source software and profitability in this entertaining guest column written for ZDNet and published at LinuxDevices.com. Perens writes . . .

“Mundie uses a textbook tactic of manipulation: start with some reasonable talk, and lead the audience to an unreasonable conclusion. The reasonable part is that businesses have to sell something to make money. And it's (deliberately) hard to commercialize GPL software. To follow Mundie's conclusion, however, you'd have to believe that the money people save by using the GNU-Linux system just disappears.”

” . . . Did you notice how the Microsoft antitrust prosecution suddenly became less of a priority after the U.S. presidential election? And now you want Microsoft to control more? It does seem appropriate to name their competition Liberty.”

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This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.