All Things Microsoft > Microsoft as a Company

Everyone's Favorite Pickle-Chugging Ass Clown Speaks

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LorKorub:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45888-2002Nov12.html

"There is no question that when the antitrust lawsuit started, most of our industry did not race to support us," Ballmer said. "We learned that we needed to take a different perspective on being a good industry leader."

.............

Absent from Ballmer's speech was any mention of the growing open-source software movement, which is viewed as the greatest challenge to Microsoft's software supremacy.

Company officials have at various times referred to the open-source approach -- which allows code to be revised by users and discourages turning it into for-profit applications -- as a cancer and an un-American assault on intellectual property.

Although Microsoft has backed away from harsh rhetoric, it is aggressively lobbying government agencies in the United States and around the world to reject Linux and other open-source applications.

Asked after the speech about open-source, Ballmer said only that Microsoft would continue to "make the case for commercially available software."

................

He no longer has anything to say?  I think that this anti-trust case, as soft as it was on them, might have bruised them a little deeper than we think.  Aside from his usual bullshit, he had no finger to point.

Calum:
the simple case is that if somebody writes something, then that person should be able to choose what copyright licence to use when releasing their work.

Personally i was thinking of publishing a piece of literature of mine online and i will probably use the LGPL or something like that for it. I should be able to do this and nobody should be able to stop me. there is nothing wrong with that in any moral code.

Whichever way you look at it, any anti-open source position is essentially an anti-choice, anti-control and anti-freedom position.

[ November 14, 2002: Message edited by: [calum@localhost]$ ]

voidmain:
Did you notice in the picture of him speaking that he is standing in front of the giant word "CROOK"?

flap:

quote:Company officials have at various times referred to the open-source approach -- which... discourages turning it into for-profit applications
--- End quote ---


Lies, lies, lies...

And I wish the monkey would keep its objections to Free Software consistent, at least. One the one hand it doesn't seem to like the idea of other people "stealing" software developers' "intellectual property"; on the other it objects to the complete opposite; that proprietary developers *aren't* allowed to rape other people's code.

Doctor V:
But the judge believed what M$ said, and decided to put her complete trust in them.  She thought, 'M$ has always broken the law before, and been caught lying even in court, but I trust them to be good from now on'.  Anyone who 1.) catches someone in a lie and then 2.) believes the next thing they say because...well I guess there is no because, should be banned from making important decisions that affect many many people.

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