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Microsoft funds questionable study attacking GPL 3 draft process
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A study (PDF) funded by Microsoft and carried out by Harvard Business School professor Alan MacCormack aims to determine what kind of features and protections developers want in version 3 of the widely-used General Public License (GPL 3). The study, which uses extremely questionable methodology, concludes that open-source software developers don’t want the GPL 3 to impose extensive patent licensing requirements or prevent agreements like the controversial cross-licensing deal between Novell and Microsoft.
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A brief glance at the methodology behind the study reveals beyond doubt that it is little more than propaganda bought and paid for by Microsoft. MacCormack describes the study as a survey of “key contributors” from major open-source projects. Although 332 emails were sent to various developers, only 34 agreed to participate in the survey—an 11 percent response rate. Of the 34 developers who responded, many of them are associated with projects like Apache and PostgreSQL that don’t even use the GPL.
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