Yee-haw. Mr. Ballmer remains in full gear over our favorite
intellectual property destroyer, taking time out of a busy day
promoting OfficeXP to explain how open source software works to
curious reporters. We'll save you a clickthrough, as his comments
on this particular issue are limited to a single swipe.
Q: Do you view Linux and the
open-source movement as a threat to Microsoft?
A: Yeah. It's good competition. It will force
us to be innovative. It will force us to justify the prices and
value that we deliver. And that's only healthy. The only thing we
have a problem with is when the government funds open-source work.
Government funding should be for work that is available to
everybody. Open source is not available to commercial companies.
The way the license is written, if you use any open-source
software, you have to make the rest of your software open source.
If the government wants to put something in the public domain, it
should. Linux is not in the public domain. Linux is a cancer that
attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it
touches. That's the way that the license works.
