[kaan]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

The Open Source crowd relies on copyright to protect their right to distribute without charging. Remove that, and corporations who have more money to spend can overwhelm their efforts by grabbing their code and selling the butchered corporate-locked version of it.

One of the reasons Linux got popular is that Microsoft couldn't legally grab it, inflict all sorts of Microcode into it, and distribute it with MS's logo as "THE BEST VERSION OF LINUX," which would fail horribly and convince people that Linux sucked.

Let me present an open source license that you are probably unfamiliar with.

Copyright (c) <YEAR>, <OWNER>
All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

* Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
* Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
* Neither the name of the <ORGANIZATION> nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

This is a BSD style license.

When Apple made OSX, they basicly took a whole lot of open source software under this kind of license, and "grabbing their code and selling the butchered corporate-locked version of it".

As for Microsoft ... where to start! Ill just mention one.
Microsoft DNS is based on bind

Even under the more restrictive GPL, Microsoft will be perfectly able to make their own Linux distribution, with logo and all, if they wish to.