Open Source guru Bruce Perens pens a special guest editorial for ZDNet that examines the current 'war' on Linux. Taking a look at Microsoft's tactics in dealing with the upstart OS, Perens explains how this campaign may fall to Linux's advantage . . .

” . . . first target is a familiar one: the folks who make Linux and other software that is under the GPL, the GNU General Public License. Considering all of those IBM ads, and the participation of every major computer manufacturer, the GNU-Linux system has indeed become a crown jewel of capitalism. This should be no surprise: Commerce has thrived in a “commons” since the first public squares were constructed, and the GPL's share-and-share-alike system creates a commons for software.

” . . . 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 . . . “

” . . . Since Mundie brought up money: Researchers have measured the input to the economy from open source, and it turns out to be huge . . . A partial count of the software available in just one noncommercial Linux system released two years ago shows that it would have cost about $1.9 billion to develop the same software the way Microsoft does it. That system came about before the big companies joined in. No doubt the number would be even larger than $1.9 Billion today . . . “

” . . . Somebody paid for all of that free software: Individual developers paid with their free time, universities took public funding and reciprocated by making their work publicly available, and businesses freed their own intellectual property for commercial reasons. The plan was to set a standard, to get the benefit of a larger development staff than any one company could support, and so on . . . ”

” . . . If open source was economically unviable, development would have ceased long before there was $1.9 billion worth of it . . . “

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