Jerry,

>In the coming weeks, you're likely to see Microsoft pressure to force the U.S. government to disallow the use of the GPL as a license for software created with public funds. If my analysis is correct, the decision should go the other way -- the government should require anyone developing software with government funds to release the software under the GPL. It's the only way to ensure there's a meaningful public commons of freely available software that can't be manipulated for predatory purposes.

I'm not an expert on GPL but what would happen if the U.S. applied GPL to all of the great stuff that comes out of NASA that was created with public funds? Manufacturing companies would not invest in equipment to produce items they could not charge for. Right? If we make software under the GPL then we should do all other stuff created with public funds as well. Maybe I'm missing something here.

Dan