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."
