"We will do some buying of companies that are built around open-source products," Ballmer said during an onstage interview at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.
A refusal to consider acquisitions of open-source developers "would take us out of the acquisition market quite dramatically," Ballmer said -- a tacit acknowledgment of how thoroughly open-source development has reshaped the software market.
It's a pretty strong turnaround from the executive who famously denounced GPL-licensed Linux as "a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches" in a 2001 interview with the Chicago Sun-Times.
[...]
Given the chilly reception Vista is getting, Microsoft might want to road-test Ballmer's willingness to buy open-source developers and go shopping for a new operating system
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lozz
16 years 26 weeks 5 days 23 hours ago
You might be rich enough to buy
You might be rich enough to buy the companies, Ballmer, but you can't buy the customers.They'll all leave in droves the second they see you coming.
motters
16 years 26 weeks 3 days 11 hours ago
I'm curious about what's going
I'm curious about what's going on here. What's Ballmer's strategy? Now we have Microsoft OSI approved licences combined with an attempt to acquire open source companies. Presumably Ballmer is trying to get some of his "intellectual property" into GNU/Linux systems one way or another under his own licences so that he can subsequently launch a patent offensive (this time genuine, as opposed to the previous FUD campaign).
jbkerns
16 years 26 weeks 2 days 8 hours ago
"Steve Ballmer would like to buy
"Steve Ballmer would like to buy your company, cancel or allow?"