Over at The Scotsman, lawyer Alison Bryce is featured in one of those stories that doubtless led to Shakespeare having Dick the Butcher say "First thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."

Her headline is "Don't believe the software scaremongers" but in fact the article is a classic bit of scaremongering.

She's repeating the Microsoft line that Linux is scary. She calls the GPL "the most restrictive license" and states quite baldly that having the source code published is dangerous. No evidence is offered.

There are also some outright howlers, like this one. "Software released under the GPL, such as the popular Linux operating system," never apparently realizing that not all Linux distros are GPL. Fine misunderstanding for an amateur, but this lady claims to be a highly-paid professional, and an expert on software law to boot.

This bit of garbage could easily have been written by Microsoft itself (and he probably cribbed off their stuff), but here's where I get angry:

In the strictest interpretation, the GPL could oblige the developer to make all of the source code of such a product available for free use. Businesses must, therefore, be careful to keep the GPL code separate from any software they wish to remain secret.

Licences at the more "relaxed" end of the spectrum - the BSD, MIT and Apache licences, for example - do not have this so-called "viral" effect. In the case of BSD-licensed code, developers are free to take what they wish, as long as the end product contains the correct copyright notices.

The whole thing is scaremongering of the worst sort. Read the whole thing, if you can hold your temper better than I. Alison's firm says she's got a secondment to "one of our major software clients."

Wonder who that could be?