The "Is VMware violating the GPL" question is circulating again (Matt Asay follows up his own post here) so I thought it would be useful to dust off an Illuminata Perspectives that I wrote when this same thing cropped up about a year ago. I've excerpted the most salient points from the original post and added a little updated commentary.

When the story about Microsoft shelling out $100,000 to Apache for ASF sponsorship broke across my radar it rather tickled my funny bone and my curiosity.

In short, we are in an adversarial situation. Microsoft does not want us to succeed. Thus we cannot trust Microsoft, even if we'd like to, and must consider Mono based upon the question "What is the worst thing MS can reasonably do?". We can only trust Mono if we are convinced Microsoft doesn't have weasel room. The current situation appears, to me, to have lots of weasel room.

Recently there have been numerous discussions on software and media piracy, with a few people even saying that open source could be the solution to stopping software piracy... However, software piracy is one of open source's biggest enemies, and few people realize that.

More deception followed by arrogance from Microsoft.

One of the most interesting journeys being undertaken at the moment in computing is that of Microsoft towards open source. Here are some more steps along that path:

The EeePC started as a niche product aimed at children. It was a huge hit, which surprised everybody - even Asus. Microsoft noticed it, and started putting pressure on Asus. While reading around, I came across this interview with Benson Lin, which proces once more that Microsoft is tying up Asus and effectively killing the GNU/Linux version of the EeePC.

Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical Ltd., which maintains the Ubuntu desktop Linux distribution said he doubts Microsoft would file suit against a free software developer unless the software giant wants "war."