Steve Ballmer is at least willing to speak with the open-source crowd now, as his comments at Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2008 demonstrate. He’s just not willing to actually engage in open source as an appreciable part of his company’s business. Fair enough.

Ballmer lacks the imagination to conceive of a world where Microsoft could open-source code and still make a lot of money (He’s apparently not heard of “Google.”):

No. 1, are our products prone to be open-sourced? No. We do provide our source code in special situations, but open source also implies free, free is inconsistent with paying for lunches at the partner conference. (Applause.)

But at least he’s willing to work with those who do grok that the future of software business (meaning: money) is open source:

Will we interoperate with products that come from like Linux, from the open-source world? Yes, we will. Will we encourage people who want to do open-source development to do it on top of Windows? Yes, we’re proud that the best PHP system in the world is actually the one that runs on Windows today, not the one that runs on Linux.

… Source:The Open Road

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 7:12 pm and is filed under Business and Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.