[luau] Steve Ballmer Bashes OS

[Ronald Willis]

Ballmer Trashes Open Source

ENTMag just came out with an article, very timely indeed, just after last
week 50% of you said you trust open source software. Perhaps MS CEO Steve
Ballmer read the article in W2Knews, but he effectively closed the door on
any MS involvement in open source initiatives, saying that the commercial
approach to software development and sales provides the best security and
value to enterprise customers.

In addition, Ballmer branded open source as a channel of last resort for
software products that failed in the commercial marketplace. While
distancing Microsoft from the open-source world, he half-jokingly replied
"never say never" when asked if the software giant would support Linux if
the market were large enough. Ballmer, known for his frank, no-holds-barred
style, fielded questions about competition from open source software and
other topics at this week's Gartner's Symposium/ ITxpo 2003 conference in
Orlando, Florida. Read more at ENT:

http://www.w2knews.com/rd/rd.cfm?id=031027RN-Ballmer

This is a profound article for those who rarely venture beyond the comfort
of KDE or Gnome. It is refreshing to hear M$ point of view on Open Source.

He ends this article with:

...Microsoft's greatest value to customers is building these features into
the core operating system, he contended. "We essentially take cost and
complexity out of the system ... as opposed to having to force our customers
to cobble them together themselves," he said. "That is part of the open
source world, the customer puts things together. We think part of our value
proposition has to be we have to take a lot of that effort out. Nobody
doubts today that it was a good idea to make a TCP/IP stack part of Windows.
It was controversial at the time it was done; it's not controversial today."