The Alexis de Tocqueville Institution report

The report issued by the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution has been extensively covered elsewhere. For those who may have missed it, here are the core points:

• The "open source helps terrorists" line that featured prominently in the advance press release is gone. Security issues are touched on, and the "security through obscurity" argument for proprietary software is presented, but the claim that open source assists terrorism has been deemphasized.

• Instead, the report is another attack on the GPL, featuring most of the usual arguments and some new ones as well. For example, the report claims that processing your code with a GPL-licensed tool (i.e. emacs or gcc) could force your code to be released under the GPL, which is nonsense.

• The quality of the research and writing is, in general, not what one would expect.

There are persistent claims that this report was directly funded by Microsoft, though nothing has been demonstrated in any definitive way. For the curious, this PoliTech posting documents many of the (numerous) past ties between Microsoft and the Institution.

(See also: this point-by-point rebuttal to the report by Leon Brooks).

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