🚀 go-pugleaf

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.

http://www.microsoft.com/msft/speech/smeet/shareholdermeeting01.htm

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
   identical with millions and millions of machines, and the bios of that
   should be open to everybody to use, and all the extensibility should be
   there. And so it was very predictable that once we had gotten the PC
   going, and going and gotten hundreds of millions of machines out there,
   that it had always been sort of free software and the universities
   would flourish and there would be more of that.

And the GPL is singled out as breaking a virtuous cycle:

   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.

   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.

Regards,
Adam