Steve Ballmer's Thoughts On Free Software

An anonymous reader writes, "Steve Ballmer during a 3-day visit to India was asked about whether Free software is the future of India. And he effectively circumvented the question and answered that in the future, software businesses can look at a number of revenue streams such as subscription fees, lower cost hardware, advertising and of course traditional transaction. What is amusing is that in answering the question, he refuses to use the word 'free' or anything close to it."

Comments

Ballmer's Free Software

[eldavojohn]

What is amusing is that in answering the question, he refuses to use the word 'free' or anything close to it.

Quite amusing. Yes, I hate Microsoft just as much as you do. Utterly loath and detest those despicable bastards.

Although, there is one minor thing I would like to point out. Back in September of 2006, they started to offer the Express Editions of a lot of their development tools for free. So I've actually been tempted to use them and I've also noticed that my Windows XP Professional CD allows me to install I2S on my machine and start hosting ASPs.

Oh, ugh, disgusting! I'm wasting my time! I should be learning Spring & Hibernate or Ruby on Rails. But, you know, there are a lot of people out there that use the .NET framework. I'm well versed with the J2EE framework already.

I know it's not open source and the license I got from them was super flaky. But in the interests of being able to use every technology available to me, I'll learn .NET. I'm more marketable to employers and, hell let's face it, even coding Microsoft libraries can be fun.

So you'll find some of their free (yes, free) software on my machine. Now, I had to pay for XP to be able to install that ... but I still feel like I paid for XP & not the Express tools.

Granted, you'll find OO.o instead of MS Office and I'll be using The Gimp 2.0 instead of ... well whatever MS's "Photoshop Killer" is ... but you must admit they're coming around as far as the term 'free' is concerned and they have to otherwise the community will simply leave them behind. Utility software should be free, in my opinion. And if it's not, we'll simply develop it ourselves. Why are there no amazingly fun open source or free games? Because necessity breeds innovation and there's no real need for games. From now until I die I'll probably have to pay a monthly subscription fee for my games.

I believe there exists for every software company a good middle ground between free open source software & proprietary cost you money software. If you develop software, draw a line where you want everyone (even competitors) using your framework or underpinnings but the real premium price mark comes in on the serious development effort or application specific software. Maybe it's just libraries but Adobe & Sun have shown us that making things free is a great way to cement yourself in the community no matter what happens to your stocks. Ballmer can't deny this even though his (lack of) heart & soul probably loath the apparent loss of green in the beginning.

You can now accomplish a lot with their standards and languages--a hell of a lot more than before when Visual Studio costed a kidney.

Re:How much support do you need, honestly?

[Mateo_LeFou]

"I don't know of much free software that is really competitive because truly free software doesn't have the support that it needs to compete with software that does have support."

I swear to god I *can't wait for this guy's comeuppance.

Don't try to parse this guy's BS too carefully. What he means here is quite simple: you get better support from
-underpaid phone help ... working from a script .. that cannot see the inner workings of the software they're helping you with

than you do from
-several million independently working professionals with intimate knowledge of the software they use, who share their solutions to various problems with the whole world.