🚀 go-pugleaf

On Fri, 09 Nov 2001 11:14:10 +1300, Adam Warner <usenet@consulting.net.nz> 
wrote:
>Said Steve Ballmer at Microsoft' shareholder meeting:
>
>   If there's a key learning for us, we can't have free software, it's
>   kind of inconsistent with the goals of most people in the room.
>
To add a little perspective to this, I think that this statement would
play well to a room full of Microsoft's shareholders.  Free software
with a license that doesn't allow exploitiation by Microsoft to make
profits to the exclusion of their competitors is obviously inconsistent 
with the goals of most of their shareholders.

The next bit is just a little bit too bizarre to explain.  I could imagine
some shareholders laughing and making Al Gore jokes about inventing the
internet.
>Bill Gates also took credit for the open source revolution:
>
>   Let me start out, really the reason that you see open source there at
>   all is because we came in and said there should be a platform that's
We who?

>   In fact, there's a very virtuous cycle where people do free things,
>   some people find that adequate, sometimes companies will take that work
>   and turn it into commercial products, those companies will hire people,
>   pay taxes. And so you see the free software and the commercial software
>   existing together.

Uh right.  But then again corporations are supposed to be selfish.  Their
shareholders will sue the directors (and win) if they behave any other way.
>
>   There is a particular approach that breaks the cycle called the GPL
>   that is not worth getting into today, but I don't think there is much
>   awareness about how so-called free software foundations designed that
>   to break that cycle.

Translation. We won't preach the FUD to the choir.  We're saving it for
where it will do the most good.

Isaac