Posted on 01/24/2020 2:53:39 PM PST by dayglored
Dayglored Note: This is a real article from 2001. Ballmer really did say this, and believe it...
Contaminates all other software with Hippie GPL rubbish
Microsoft CEO and incontinent over-stater of facts Steve Ballmer said that "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches," during a commercial spot masquerading as a interview with the Chicago Sun-Times on June 1, 2001.
Ballmer was trying to articulate his concern, whether real or imagined, that limited recourse to the GNU GPL requires that all software be made open source.
"The way the license is written, if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source," Ballmer explained to an excessively credulous, un-named Sun-Times reporter who, predictably, neglected to question this bold assertion.
Perhaps Ballmer was thinking of this: "If identifiable sections of [a companion] work are not derived from the [open-source] Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it."
The passage is hopelessly ill written. What on earth, we must wonder, can the authors mean by a companion work which can be 'reasonably considered' to be separate? Do they mean it should have been developed independently? Do they mean it should function independently? Do they mean both?
What if a secondary work were developed separately, and function separately, but remain inextricably integrated with the first, the way Internet Explorer is with Windows? Is that 'reasonably considered' to be a separate work?
What's 'reasonable' here, anyway? And 'considered' by whom? The average adult? The average programmer? It's vague, all right; we'll give old Steve that much.
But one thing we can depend on is that it definitely doesn't mean what Ballmer slickly tries to imply: that once you issue anything under the GPL, every other piece of software you have for sale is suddenly affected by it.
And yet this is the shaky basis on which Ballmer dismisses open source as anathema to all commercial software companies. It can't be used at all, he reasons, because even a tiny germ of it, like a metastasizing cancer, contaminates the entire body. Thus Microsoft 'has a problem' with government funding of open-source.
"Government funding should be for work that is available to everybody," he says patriotically. But "open source is not available to commercial companies," and should therefore be regarded as a violation of the public trust.
Ballmer touches on a few other items, including Microsoft's new product activation and licensing schemes, which, it is hoped, will pave the way for a thriving software rental business and its subsequent endless revenue stream.
"Our goal is to try to educate people on what it means to protect intellectual property and pay for it properly" (read 'eternally'), Ballmer says.
If by 'educate' he means punish with higher costs those who fail to appreciate the wisdom of volume software leases, and inconvenience Win-XP users who like to re-format on a regular basis with a limit of two clean installs, then perhaps he might have chosen different wording.
'Train' or 'housebreak' strike us as somewhat more in tune with the subtext. ®
Top 10 Steve Ballmer quotes: '%#&@!!' and so much more
Which is harder to believe: That Ballmer was so off-his-rocker, or that Microsoft now ships their latest release of Windows with a Linux kernel???
When my Windows 7 dies I’m going run Linux.
Steve Ballmer: “the only people still working at Apple are people too stupid to work any place else.”
I don't know when he said that but for a while it was an accurate statement.
That is, "Language Alert".
I've been running Linux on my own PC since 2002. I still have to deal with Windows at work but never at home.
I put Linux Mint on a 5 year old computer last year and use it almost exclusively as it runs MUCH faster than Windows 10. Reboot time in about a minute. Start up from cold about 30 seconds. No virus to worry about.
No I don’t think it was ever an accurate statement, not even when they were on death watch in 1997.
Just wait until the L.A. Clippers win the NBA title this year. He will become even more insufferable.
The GNU GPL was a way to infect all software and make it public. It did not work because courts did not accept it as defensible. But my company on the advice of several lawyers rid ourselves of all GNU GPL code. The language was a bit vague. But it could certainly be interpreted to mean that any code that was used in conjunction with GNU GPL code was forevermore also general public code.
I negotiated thousands of software contracts. I even negotiated some software contracts with Microsoft. Their lawyers and ours agreed on this point. And it matters a great deal. Not because Microsoft wants to own the world, or creates the best code. The reason they care is because all Microsoft contracts state that they have the right to sell or license their code. And you can’t make that point if its public domain code.
Another issue with public domain code is that it can have viruses. All code can. But if your programmers are borrowing anything they find on the web and using it in their code, who knows what back-doors are in the borrowed code.
I understand that IBM went early to Linux and GPL. And that Microsoft changed their stance. But they are still careful of code that is not homegrown.
LOL! Had me going for a second as I just jumped to Linux Mint 19.3 from Window 10 yesterday. Got tired of Winders stepping on it’s own wiener while sifting through it’s vastly over-bloated code. That and the interminable updates to “the last version of Windows you’ll ever need”. They got that right - just not in the way they intended.
The GNU GPL was a way to infect all software and make it public. It did not work because courts did not accept it as defensible. But my company on the advice of several lawyers rid ourselves of all GNU GPL code. The language was a bit vague. But it could certainly be interpreted to mean that any code that was used in conjunction with GNU GPL code was for ever more also general public code.
I negotiated thousands of software contracts. I even negotiated some software contracts with Microsoft. Their lawyers and ours agreed on this point. And it matters a great deal. Not because Microsoft wants to own the world, or creates the best code. The reason they care is because all Microsoft contracts state that they have the right to sell or license their code. And you can’t make that point if its public domain code.
Another issue with public domain code is that it can have viruses. All code can. But if your programmers are borrowing anything they find on the web and using it in their code, who knows what back-doors are in the borrowed code.
I understand that IBM went early to Linux and GPL. And that Microsoft changed their stance. But they are still careful of code that is not homegrown.
Linux is a cancer? Seems to me Microsoft is responsible for killing more computers and private data than Linux could ever fathom.
A former Microfail CEO, I’m not surprised.
That being said, I’ll continue running Windows 7 until men in black suits come visit me. Other than that, I refuse to run an OS that spies on me.
Ping!
*snicker* Love it. I’ll say this, I’m currently using an Acer laptop running Win 10, and a Dell Latitude C610(!) running XP SP3(!!) as a 32 bit backup (legacy apps, and all that). But I have a dormant eMachines tower in the caddy under my desk and a new 500 GB SATA drive to install in it, and as soon as my fingers get off their collective asses and order a KVM switch, I’m gonna fire it all back up and throw Linux Mint on it. I’m semi-retired after 22 years in IT, and I like having different OS boxes all running at once. Redundancy.
I always thought that Ballmer was something of an anger manager. Flogging the troops constantly, but with limited vision of his real business.
Those kinds of people can produce short-term benefits, but are sub-optimal over the longer term. MSFT languished under his reign (and the royal connotation is intentional).
Name one version of Windows that hackers didn’t love. I believe Linux or Unix is difficult to hack.
.quora.com:
“What OS is more susceptible to hacking or crashes, Linux Mint or Windows 10?”
“Definitely Windows 10 or any version of windows really, especially the older ones.”
Not as many. Anybody with a machine connected to the public network should be mindful about safety and security.
I had a linux machine seriously hacked about 20 years ago. The experience caused me to dedicate substantial time to understanding "all that."
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