Thanks for the good points there.

The things I see in your reply lead me to more questions regarding the use of looking at GPL'd source and the not so much the license itself, but the operating system in general, which MS is looking into as a model for features and improvements in its operating system which indeed did rely on others' code in its inception (NT was with the help of IBM in the days MS was in bed with them, and 9x which was bought from a little guy who made QDOS), and to be fair, they indeed did make a lot of thier own code, but it seems to me they are doing the tried and true thing they did yesteryear... borrow.

With open source software and the Linux kernel (I do not think personally it is just the kernel but other stuff as well such as X and other utilities such as GNU tools), they are in a serious effort to ask what parts of Linux makes it attractive to customers and why the need to not give any more money to Microsoft. Personally in this area, I do not think it is limited to Microsoft, but the philosophy behind closed source in general... keep software free, no patents, yadda yadda, yadda. Does this mean MS and other closed source vendors will embrace open source software and use it inthier own programs, or will they just borrow ideas and code to impliment in future operating systems? The thing is, Linux is so different form Windows it is obvious even to a newbie programmer to use parts of the kernel in Win might be a tad difficult but is not out of reach, espcially with the money they have, however, it seems more realisitc they will see what is driving people to dump Windows operating systems for Linux. Is this against fair competition, or is the GPL even in the catagory to even make the argument when anybody can tweak it?

I know I rambled on and on, but damn it, this is interesting!