Craig Mundie - Definition and Overview

Craig Mundie is chief technical officer of advanced strategies and policy at Microsoft and a well-known advocate of commercial software. Mundie has repeatedly been accused of spreading FUD by people in the open source and free software community. In a May 3, 2001 speech, Mundie claimed:

Some of the most successful OSS technology is licensed under the GNU General Public License or GPL. The GPL mandates that any software that incorporates source code already licensed under the GPL will itself become subject to the GPL. When the resulting software product is distributed, its creator must make the entire source code base freely available to everyone, at no additional charge. This viral aspect of the GPL poses a threat to the intellectual property of any organization making use of it. It also fundamentally undermines the independent commercial software sector because it effectively makes it impossible to distribute software on a basis where recipients pay for the product rather than just the cost of distribution.

Both Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds have responded critically to Mundie's speech.

Mundie is mentioned in the opening of the movie Revolution OS, where Eric Raymond tells a story about encountering him in an elevator and telling him that "I'm your worst nightmare".

External links

• Full text of Mundie's May 2001 speech (http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/craig/05-03sharedsource.asp)
• Richard Stallman's response: Freedom and Cooperation (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/audio/audio.html#NYU2001) (speech in Ogg Vorbis audio format)
• Mundie biography at Microsoft (http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/craig/default.asp)