Steve Mills has sounded off on the GPL. From reading these comments, and from watching IBM over the years, it seems that IBM is a fan of any open source software that it can incorporate into its products (or product line) without giving anything back. Yes, I know that it has been a great partner on the Linux kernel, as well as Xen and other GPL'd software. But IBM's fetish for all things Apache has kept it from Steve Mills has sounded off on the GPL. From reading these comments, and from watching IBM over the years, it seems that IBM is a fan of any open source software that it can incorporate into its products (or product line) without giving anything back. Yes, I know that it has been a great partner on the Linux kernel, as well as Xen and other GPL’d software. But IBM’s fetish for all things Apache has kept it from seeing open source as a tool that it can monetize directly – it only sees open source through a “complements” lens, and I think it therefore misses much….“At some point you become so shrill and beyond what’s required that you lose the audience and the audience moves on to something else,” he said. “We’ll have to see what finally evolves through the [GPL] process, it’s going through an update and the Free Software Foundation has a particular view of free software. Free software is a wonderful thing but there’s also a business model.” “We think there are other licensing techniques, the Apache license and others are somewhat less onerous. We use them ourselves. We don’t use the GPL for reasons of its restrictions,” Mills said.It’s not clear what audience Mills is worried about the FSF/GPL losing. After all, the GPL governs over 72% of the projects on Sourceforge. He may well wish that Linux, Alfresco, Jasper Reports, Xen, etc. etc. were Apache-licensed so that he could drop them into his proprietary products and keep to his 20th Century business model. But just because it’s comfortable for him doesn’t mean that the open source world should capitulate to his whims. So IBM hasn’t figured out what the rest of us know with ever-increasing certitude: it’s possible to monetize open source directly. Ironically, it becomes easier the more freedom that imbues the software. Even more ironically, this is so because companies like IBM don’t want to touch software that is free – it threatens their proprietary software.I think highly of IBM, but find its antipathy to the GPL to be silly. Open Source