🚀 go-pugleaf

They really do live in a fantasy world, don't they ?

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.
>
>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


Brendan

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