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by veidr 4073 days ago
What I think is "obvious to those who are not unduly biased" is that he was cherrypicking the most extreme example (the restrictive GPL license, which is not used by most open source software[1]), and then trying to use that to spraypaint FUD over the (much) broader open source concept as a whole.

"Open source is not available to commercial companies" is about as factually incorrect as any statement in the English language can aspire to be.

[1]: http://johnhaller.com/useful-stuff/open-source-license-popul...
2 comments
mreiland 4072 days ago
weird how the GPL shows up as the most popular license by having double the marketshare of number 2.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft#Viral_licensing

" Craig Mundie remarked, "This viral aspect of the GPL poses a threat to the intellectual property of any organization making use of it."[35] In another context, Steve Ballmer declared that code released under GPL is useless to the commercial sector (since it can only be used if the resulting surrounding code becomes GPL), describing it thus as "a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches"."

It seems even the Wiki editors believe he was speaking about the GPL.

Stop being a jackass.

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the_why_of_y 4070 days ago
If any of that FUD were true, how do you explain that Microsoft has been shipping the "Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications" add-on for Windows Server for a decade, while Ballmer was CEO?

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc771470.aspx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX

It includes GPL-licensed programs such as GCC and GDB; shouldn't Microsoft have released the source code of Windows Server by now if these statements weren't anything but FUD?

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thomasz 4072 days ago
That was 2001. There was no SAS loophole to exploit. If you desired to sell software, you had to ship it. In a box. The GPL was as viable for businesses back then as the AGPL is today.
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dragonwriter 4072 days ago
> That was 2001. There was no SAS loophole to exploit. If you desired to sell software, you had to ship it.

People have been selling access to remotely hosted services since long before 2001 (since before the web, the FSF/GPL, or even the internet or even ARPAnet existed.)

The thing now referred to as "SaaS" has been a thing a lot longer than the name "Software-as-a-Service" or the acronym "SaaS" to refer to the concept has existed.

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sukilot 4071 days ago
In 2001 I sold a closed-source commercial product that ran on Linux and used LGPL librsries.
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