Bill G.: Open Source 都是 M$ 的功勞... ？

[bryanchang]

http://www.microsoft.com/msft/speech/smeet/shareholdermeeting01.htm

QUESTION: It appears to me that the open source movement is gaining momentum, and as I understand it the key to success of a software product involves efficiently building an ecosystem of developers and users, resellers, and so forth. Doesn't the open source model a more efficient paradigm for building such a community around your products, and isn't perhaps Microsoft maybe on the wrong side of that trend of long-term?

Billy G.: 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. We certainly accept free software as part of the software ecosystem. 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.
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[老殊]

How dare you Billy, remember what you have said to Linux? Maybe too much $$$ & no game made Billy a dull boy.... [img]images/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif[/img]