You must have heard the news that M$ has released kernel driver for Linux with GPLv2 License. So did really do a great job? Did it help Linux community in any way?
Lets see what the driver is about. The kernel driver is supposed to make Linux run better on Hyper-V virtual machines. That is just a marketing plan that will help M$ sell more of M$ Hyper-V Server 2008. It is not different than open-vm tools by VMWare. So it does not seem to do Linux community any good. It does good to M$ of course.
And about the License, they have used GPLv2 License. Of course, they understand the GPL license more than any others, since it concerns them a lot. And it is obvious they did not go for GPLv3 because they have already said they will not touch GPLv3 with a 10-foot pole, for obvious reasons. They have used GPLv2 for its vagueness (which arose the need for GPLv3). And by the way, an engineer has already stated in his blog that M$ has violated GPLv2 already.
So how is is going to do any good to Linux community? One way I can imagine is not having to set up another group of developers to build that so one who wants to use Linux on top of Hyper-V can use it properly, without having to wait for Linux developers to do it (we know Ntfs writing in Linux, it took a lot of time for those who wanted to write to Ntfs from Linux). And that is the only way I can imagine.
Anyways, that saves a lot of work for Linux community and I expect M$ to write code that makes it easy for users who wish to run Linux in the future (be it on their Virtual Environment or be it anywhere else that concerns M$). Someone has said on his blog that M$ is trying to do a deadly embrace using the driver module. But I think that is too paranoid and I personally don’t think they have any such plans (although that may be just me).
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