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MS To Become Open Source Friendly Post Gates

ruphus13 writes "Now that Gates has 'retired' from Microsoft, ZDNet is speculating that Microsoft will become much more Open Source friendly. From the article, 'We already see quite a different approach to dealing with OSS and OSS companies from Sam Ramji's group [which is] doing a great job in establishing dialog,' said Rafael Laguna, CEO of Open-Xchange and a former marketing exec at SUSE Linux. 'With Gates' departure, the only mammoth remaining is Ballmer. With him away in a near future, Microsoft will definitely open up. They have to.'" Microsoft could become the world's largest open source company; they've certainly made some concessions to it lately.

3 of 424 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Bitch, bitch, bitch by NeverVotedBush · · Score: -1, Troll

    Shut up, Melinda.

  2. has done more?! by rbanffy · · Score: -1, Troll

    "Bill Gates has done more to create the thriving computer industry than anybody else"?!

    The computer industry was thriving just fine. In fact, the Windows monopoly and the PC-clone industry has, most probably, prevented a lot of technological advances from seeing the light of day.

    Do we all use the same x86 instruction set because it's superior to anything else? No. We use it _because_ just about every computer is built to run Windows. And it happens to run on x86s.

    Prior to the ecological disaster that the PC-clone market was, there was a thriving industry producing a vast variety of different computers. While then we had Crays and Connection Machines, now we build our supercomputers out of PC parts because anything else has to be custom built.

    So... That's what a thriving industry looks like.

  3. Re:In related news... by McGiraf · · Score: 0, Troll

    I have the same reaction when an adult say he's a Christian and when an adult says he believes in Santa. After that their opinion on science or anything else is quite moot to say the least.