I actually agree with that quote. But her actions don't follow it.
Part of the problem has been caused by her sale of what were previously national assets (the North Sea oil fields, etc) at bargain basement rates, when they should have remained national assets - the very definition of the "joining together" she talks about. By all means, free enterprise when hiring companies to exploit your national assets, but the assets, and their product, should remain in public ownership.
Part of the problem has been the swing of power and accumulation of wealth towards the oligarchs - and that may well have happened mostly after her time.
Another problem has been that the wages of basic labour have been eroded to the point where you really are better off on the dole - the majority of recipients of tax credits for the impoverished in the UK are employed. The current Conservative party have decided to rectify this "loophole" by demanding that people enter work placements in exchange for their benefits - an epically stupid move. What employer of basic-rate labour is going to actually pay their workers a living wage, when they can just fire them, and then pick them up again on "Workfare" - they don't just get free labour paid for by the taxpayer, they get to use them as a cudgel to depress the wages of all their other workers.
I violate my corporate IT policy on a daily basis, just to get my job done. At the moment, I get away with this because i) the IT department aren't sharp enough to detect it and ii) the people who know I do it, know that if I didn't do it, half the stuff I get done would not get done.
If a law were passed in my jurisdiction making this a criminal act rather than a harmless yet productive eccentricity, I'd have to quit and become my own employer.
Steam for Linux is x86 (32 bit) - probably mostly because the Ubuntu download page still recommends that people download and install the 32-bit version.
And to be fair, it's still a good choice - the kernel has PAE support built in by default, so you can address all your RAM even if you have > 4GB. And most people don't have a need to run a single process that addresses more than 4GB of space - even modern games.
It's not the BEST choice, because the 64-bit instruction set probably improves some high-performance programs (like modern games). But most of the games I see on Windows are 32-bit executables anyway, presumably because the developer or publisher doesn't want to invest in multi-platform quality control for the sake of the small number of customers who would benefit.
Yeah, as I've commented before, what business really needs to move to Linux is a department or service company that specializes in converting all the stuff they have implemented as VBA, Access databases, and spittle, across to the new platform.
Yup, and this is likely the motivation behind UEFI Secure Boot. It sounds great - who would turn down "better security" - but it really does mean better security - for Microsoft, who can be sure that they can prevent a machine running anything they haven't cryptographically signed themselves. Not yet, but this is one of those things where you can easily see which way they want the wind to blow. They are setting up the same walled garden as Apple has in iOS.
Why? Because I bought a game that needed a cryptographic API that wasn't available in Windows 2000 - it just refused to install. And I thought "what the heck, may as well go for up-to-date".
I'm sure it wasn't the game that needed newer crypto, of course, it was the DRM on the game.
I upgraded to Windows 7 voluntarily, and we all know why I did that too.
A car is a bad analogy. You don't drive a car once, then stick it in the garage. Driving the car does not reduce it's subsequent utility (much).
If you're the kind of person who watches a show once and doesn't feel the urge to watch it again, then if you watch an unauthorised copy, you are a lost sale. That's what the copyright owner loses - the opportunity to make some money out of you.
Other ways they might lose the opportunity to make money out of you include if you watch the first part of a season and decide it's not worth watching. This would make a GOOD car analogy, you've had a test drive.
Sure, the care owner wouldn't mind, doesn't lose anything, but it's not the car owner we're talking about. We're talking about the car manufacturer. And I'm fairly certain that Ford would come smacking down hard on anyone making perfect Ford knockoffs.
the details will likely remain secret for another decade.
If they have something viable, I really hope not.
The Navy could do more for world peace than they ever could with ships and subs if they have their hands on a fusion reactor that works (read : is practical).
The smallest available form factor for flash memory is the MicroSD card ; which comes in capacities up to 64GB in a device the size of your fingernail, and can be concealed in any number of places - a roll of body fat, beside the gum in the mouth, taped to virtually any location on the body, inside a body cavity, tucked between any of the layers of a pair of sneakers, tucked into the hem of your coat, etc, etc.
Even the full sized USB thumbs are incredibly easy to conceal in a cavity. And what do you do about smartphones, MP3 players, etc, that all come with their own vast complement of flash RAM? Ban iPods?
Policing this is basically impossible, because the number of police you'd need to police it effectively would become uneconomical very rapidly. Even to dissuade this kind of sneakernet, you're talking random arrests and full strip-searches including X-ray and cavity search of a significant number of the population - which is yet more incitement to revolution.
I can't easily re-use the work on other projects because I've _already signed_ intellectual property licenses with a previous company under an Apache license
Out of interest, can you link to the clause in the APL2 license that causes this difficulty? It's not something I heard before and something I hadn't considered.
The main problem with Wave was it was a great distributed collaboration platform that lamentably was stuck on a few Google development servers. All the parts about federation to multiple nodes obviously acknowledged that it wasn't scalable centrally.. which is probably why it was killed. Google's vision depends on their machines doing the work, rather than your machines doing the work.
This is the way that cloud fad is going to go though - as with the prior revolution of computing, where tasks you traditionally farmed off onto a mainframe now done on the local desktop, the cloud will spread out from the web farms of the major players onto the more local hardware nodes of users and their employers. This is the joy of service based computing, as opposed to application based computing ; if you're selling a service, unless it absolutely requires that the server aggregate everyone the service calls of everyone else (e.g. Twitter), someone will find a way of providing it more locally.
I have to disagree. Most of the formats I see developed this way end up horrible messes because they hire a whole bunch of consultants to do the work.
The difficulty with that is that contractors are paid by the hour, so you don't get
* Re-use of other standards where appropriate
I've seen people reinvent the wheel so many times it's not true. This is true from simple little things like time values in XML (xsd:time sensibly uses ISO8601, this lot made up their own format, with ensuing hilarity when implementers think that their standard XML tool kit date / time types will produce valid documents), diagram formats (they just copied another standard verbatim into their documents rather than saying - "Hey, lets use this standard and say so"), and document formats (they didn't like the ability of XHTML to have script tags in it, so they copied THAT as well).
* Simplicity
Simple designs that work don't generate billable hours. Complex monsters that require hours of argument over the finer points of what they actually mean, do.
* Implementations
Implementations are essential for the development of standards. If you don't implement them, you don't get any kind of feel for the actual needs of the problem domain and how well your design is solving them. Alas, standards developed by publicly funded committee in my experience don't bother with this, and typically don't include any actual software engineers to tell them what problems they might be causing for implementers down the line.
Things like pretending an identifier is an integer when all the handling means you have to treat it like a string (it consists of four separate fields, one of them optional, but as a stream of digits and not bytes). Or taking a set of metadata that you have to understand to read the data, and.. embedding that data inside the data itself. Or creating an abstract data type with a contract and then insisting that people store it without thinking about it's concrete requirements.
Formats thought up by corporations at least have the benefit of their creators not wanting to spend as much time as possible debating the finer points of the thing. They want something that works, but as evidenced by MOO-XML, practicality often means they end up with a real mess as well - but at least it's a real mess, and not just a theoretical mess.
I think "Open" is more important than "Standard". "Standard" gives the appearance of authority, but "Open" means you have a chance of things being useful.
MOO-XML is a horrifying mess. Not even MS Office implements it. It's a "standard", having been ratified by ISO, but nothing about it's development was "open".
FreeMind is a small java mind-map program. FreeMind format isn't a "standard", but it is "open". And it is useful - useful enough that most of the other mind-map programs will import it. You can open the files up in a text editor, or feed them through XSLT, or consume them with a program and do interesting things with them. And if you want a feature implemented in it, you can patch the sources, and even feed the patch back upstream.
I think collaboration on trying to solve a problem benefits from some actual problem solving, rather than just talking about what the problem might be and how it might be solved if so.
Because GPP is living in an imaginary world where there are no Linux drivers for smartcards.
Or in a real world where the integrated authentication is some kind of horrible proprietary thing that doesn't follow standards, which would rather prove the point about lock-in...
Yeah, my lot have to manage the transition to Windows 7 for a whole bunch of bespoke applications. We got shot of IE6 and heavens, we were glad, because our stupid timesheet software used ActiveX so we had to ditch that too.
The only thing really holding us back from moving to Linux is MS Office. The NHS had an enterprise-wide license, which a back-of-napkin estimate says must have cost on the order of £100M per year. That got dropped a while ago, I'm guessing because it was a big fat line item in the budget and made a ripe target for people saying "hey, what if we spent some small fraction of that on LibreOffice development?".
A lot of our bespoke apps are Java and thus don't really need Windows to work. Web apps are web apps.
But we, like everywhere, I suspect, have a large number of things cobbled together from VBA and spit, not to mention the things people do with Access. Any coherent plan to move to Linux, or even LibreOffice, needs a department dedicated to migrating VBA and Access applications.
I like this trend, but I think Open Government License is counterproductive Not-Invented-Hereism. It's basically a BSD-style license, but also contains an exhortation not to break British law.
Well, British law is already an exhortation not to break British law. You don't need an extra one. They should just use Apache 2 if they want a BSD-style license ; everyone's IP legal department already knows it.
People do use Skype for business reasons. Skype sells products for business reasons. I use Skype for business reasons (but my business is basically public knowledge anyway, so no need to steal it). Does the business version come without the back door? Didn't think so.
One of the major sticking points with ECHELON for many was not that it was used to spy on middle school gossip, but that it was used to pass corporate intelligence to favoured "partners of the state".
It's only a matter of time before the back door itself becomes one of those pieces of intelligence as well.
They were clearly just deep in the crust. Not only would the core still be too hot for life, even thousands of years after the 21st century, without a temperature differential they can't harvest the geothermal power for their systems ; ergo, they need to be close enough to the cold surface.
Don't think for a second that magically, everyone where you live will be immune to the "pick on that which is different than the norm" mentality.
Well, yeah, you're demonstrating that quite adequately. But where would we be as a race without people who think differently to the norm? Probably living in caves hunting things for meat.
It's a stepping stone - you've identified some of the problems with the idea of taping things up.
The next step would be thinking forward, not backwards.
If you know eliminating panel gaps improves fuel efficiency, why not fill the permanent gaps in the factory with some kind of coloured sealant that matches the paint?
For doors, what about inflatable seals that extend past the edges of the doors to fill the gaps? Or a rubber edge on the door that sits flush with the body panel when the door closes?
Better than just shouting "people are bastards, we hates them, hsssss".
* Panel gaps that aren't on doors (or on doors that you don't use)
You don't crack the bonnet every day. There will be panel gaps on the bumpers, etc. If you don't habitually have passengers in the rear seats, tape the door seals up. Three door models probably do much better than 5 doors models - but don't sell well in the American market because you have to be agile enough to climb into the back seat...
That's not our beef with it - our problem with choosing BSD-style licenses for our code is not that the original code disappears, it's twofold
i) We granted the freedom to use our code to the person receiving our software. We'd like the person receiving it to be good enough to do the same.
ii) We put effort into the code - possibly a large community has put in many man hours of work. It doesn't seem fair that a corporation could take that code, roll it into a product, and make a profit selling it, without contributing to the community that created it in the first place, but that is what BSD permits.
Incidentally, GPL permits this too - it's all about distribution of the software. If a corporation builds software on GPL code, they only have to share their changes with whoever they distribute to. That could be themselves, or just their customers.
What GPL doesn't permit is that you forbid the recipients of your software from redistributing it, and it doesn't allow you to withhold the source code from them. BSD style licenses allow you to add these restrictions, GPL does not.
So corporations love BSD licenses because it lets them get something for nothing, with no obligation to give anything back. There are still benefits in contribution to BSD licensed projects - like a reduced overhead, why maintain your patches when the community will do it for you?
I work for the UK government in software development - I happen to think that GPL is an appropriate license for all government-funded software. If the people are funding it, all the people ought to be able to continue to benefit from it. Of course, corporations don't see it this way and refuse to play ball if you mention it - so the most common license we use is APL2. It irks me that they get a free ride from my taxes. That's not capitalism, that's socialism - for corporations.
Cringeley (I think) wrote a column once that opined that Microsoft should just make Windows into a desktop environment for Linux, thereby gaining the services of a huge community of excellent kernel developers. It made a kind of sense.
Which is of course a lie. Just because I have GPL software on my Windows machine, does not mean I have to make any software I write open source.
I don't even have to make it so if I compile a C program with the gcc - a GPL compiler. It explicitly says this in the license.
The same applies to any GPL program - using it does not make the works you create with it GPL as well.
Just a massive bit of FUD. Ballmer should be thankful that there have been open-source developers writing programs that work on Windows, increasing the value of his platform at no cost to his corporation.
Yeah, I proved that to my own satisfaction when I was a kid. I painted the stitching on one of our deckchairs with a solution of biological detergent, operating on the hypothesis that if this stuff eats biological material, then it would rot the stitches. My grandfather fell through that chair the next day.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually agree with that quote. But her actions don't follow it.
Part of the problem has been caused by her sale of what were previously national assets (the North Sea oil fields, etc) at bargain basement rates, when they should have remained national assets - the very definition of the "joining together" she talks about. By all means, free enterprise when hiring companies to exploit your national assets, but the assets, and their product, should remain in public ownership.
Part of the problem has been the swing of power and accumulation of wealth towards the oligarchs - and that may well have happened mostly after her time.
Another problem has been that the wages of basic labour have been eroded to the point where you really are better off on the dole - the majority of recipients of tax credits for the impoverished in the UK are employed. The current Conservative party have decided to rectify this "loophole" by demanding that people enter work placements in exchange for their benefits - an epically stupid move. What employer of basic-rate labour is going to actually pay their workers a living wage, when they can just fire them, and then pick them up again on "Workfare" - they don't just get free labour paid for by the taxpayer, they get to use them as a cudgel to depress the wages of all their other workers.
I violate my corporate IT policy on a daily basis, just to get my job done. At the moment, I get away with this because i) the IT department aren't sharp enough to detect it and ii) the people who know I do it, know that if I didn't do it, half the stuff I get done would not get done.
If a law were passed in my jurisdiction making this a criminal act rather than a harmless yet productive eccentricity, I'd have to quit and become my own employer.
Steam for Linux is x86 (32 bit) - probably mostly because the Ubuntu download page still recommends that people download and install the 32-bit version.
And to be fair, it's still a good choice - the kernel has PAE support built in by default, so you can address all your RAM even if you have > 4GB. And most people don't have a need to run a single process that addresses more than 4GB of space - even modern games.
It's not the BEST choice, because the 64-bit instruction set probably improves some high-performance programs (like modern games). But most of the games I see on Windows are 32-bit executables anyway, presumably because the developer or publisher doesn't want to invest in multi-platform quality control for the sake of the small number of customers who would benefit.
Yeah, as I've commented before, what business really needs to move to Linux is a department or service company that specializes in converting all the stuff they have implemented as VBA, Access databases, and spittle, across to the new platform.
Yup, and this is likely the motivation behind UEFI Secure Boot. It sounds great - who would turn down "better security" - but it really does mean better security - for Microsoft, who can be sure that they can prevent a machine running anything they haven't cryptographically signed themselves. Not yet, but this is one of those things where you can easily see which way they want the wind to blow. They are setting up the same walled garden as Apple has in iOS.
Yeah, I skipped WinXP and went straight to Vista.
Why? Because I bought a game that needed a cryptographic API that wasn't available in Windows 2000 - it just refused to install. And I thought "what the heck, may as well go for up-to-date".
I'm sure it wasn't the game that needed newer crypto, of course, it was the DRM on the game.
I upgraded to Windows 7 voluntarily, and we all know why I did that too.
A car is a bad analogy. You don't drive a car once, then stick it in the garage. Driving the car does not reduce it's subsequent utility (much).
If you're the kind of person who watches a show once and doesn't feel the urge to watch it again, then if you watch an unauthorised copy, you are a lost sale. That's what the copyright owner loses - the opportunity to make some money out of you.
Other ways they might lose the opportunity to make money out of you include if you watch the first part of a season and decide it's not worth watching. This would make a GOOD car analogy, you've had a test drive.
Sure, the care owner wouldn't mind, doesn't lose anything, but it's not the car owner we're talking about. We're talking about the car manufacturer. And I'm fairly certain that Ford would come smacking down hard on anyone making perfect Ford knockoffs.
the details will likely remain secret for another decade.
If they have something viable, I really hope not.
The Navy could do more for world peace than they ever could with ships and subs if they have their hands on a fusion reactor that works (read : is practical).
The rubbing of the air against the insulating plastic nozzle is what causes the static AFAIK.
You can get special vacuums with conductive nozzles that don't accumulate static, but I just tend to just use canned air these days.
Pat downs are basically useless for this.
The smallest available form factor for flash memory is the MicroSD card ; which comes in capacities up to 64GB in a device the size of your fingernail, and can be concealed in any number of places - a roll of body fat, beside the gum in the mouth, taped to virtually any location on the body, inside a body cavity, tucked between any of the layers of a pair of sneakers, tucked into the hem of your coat, etc, etc.
Even the full sized USB thumbs are incredibly easy to conceal in a cavity. And what do you do about smartphones, MP3 players, etc, that all come with their own vast complement of flash RAM? Ban iPods?
Policing this is basically impossible, because the number of police you'd need to police it effectively would become uneconomical very rapidly. Even to dissuade this kind of sneakernet, you're talking random arrests and full strip-searches including X-ray and cavity search of a significant number of the population - which is yet more incitement to revolution.
I can't easily re-use the work on other projects because I've _already signed_ intellectual property licenses with a previous company under an Apache license
Out of interest, can you link to the clause in the APL2 license that causes this difficulty? It's not something I heard before and something I hadn't considered.
Yeah, but he got sick of living in the USA.
The main problem with Wave was it was a great distributed collaboration platform that lamentably was stuck on a few Google development servers. All the parts about federation to multiple nodes obviously acknowledged that it wasn't scalable centrally.. which is probably why it was killed. Google's vision depends on their machines doing the work, rather than your machines doing the work.
This is the way that cloud fad is going to go though - as with the prior revolution of computing, where tasks you traditionally farmed off onto a mainframe now done on the local desktop, the cloud will spread out from the web farms of the major players onto the more local hardware nodes of users and their employers. This is the joy of service based computing, as opposed to application based computing ; if you're selling a service, unless it absolutely requires that the server aggregate everyone the service calls of everyone else (e.g. Twitter), someone will find a way of providing it more locally.
I have to disagree. Most of the formats I see developed this way end up horrible messes because they hire a whole bunch of consultants to do the work.
The difficulty with that is that contractors are paid by the hour, so you don't get
* Re-use of other standards where appropriate
I've seen people reinvent the wheel so many times it's not true. This is true from simple little things like time values in XML (xsd:time sensibly uses ISO8601, this lot made up their own format, with ensuing hilarity when implementers think that their standard XML tool kit date / time types will produce valid documents), diagram formats (they just copied another standard verbatim into their documents rather than saying - "Hey, lets use this standard and say so"), and document formats (they didn't like the ability of XHTML to have script tags in it, so they copied THAT as well).
* Simplicity
Simple designs that work don't generate billable hours. Complex monsters that require hours of argument over the finer points of what they actually mean, do.
* Implementations
Implementations are essential for the development of standards. If you don't implement them, you don't get any kind of feel for the actual needs of the problem domain and how well your design is solving them. Alas, standards developed by publicly funded committee in my experience don't bother with this, and typically don't include any actual software engineers to tell them what problems they might be causing for implementers down the line.
Things like pretending an identifier is an integer when all the handling means you have to treat it like a string (it consists of four separate fields, one of them optional, but as a stream of digits and not bytes). Or taking a set of metadata that you have to understand to read the data, and .. embedding that data inside the data itself. Or creating an abstract data type with a contract and then insisting that people store it without thinking about it's concrete requirements.
Formats thought up by corporations at least have the benefit of their creators not wanting to spend as much time as possible debating the finer points of the thing. They want something that works, but as evidenced by MOO-XML, practicality often means they end up with a real mess as well - but at least it's a real mess, and not just a theoretical mess.
I think "Open" is more important than "Standard". "Standard" gives the appearance of authority, but "Open" means you have a chance of things being useful.
MOO-XML is a horrifying mess. Not even MS Office implements it. It's a "standard", having been ratified by ISO, but nothing about it's development was "open".
FreeMind is a small java mind-map program. FreeMind format isn't a "standard", but it is "open". And it is useful - useful enough that most of the other mind-map programs will import it. You can open the files up in a text editor, or feed them through XSLT, or consume them with a program and do interesting things with them. And if you want a feature implemented in it, you can patch the sources, and even feed the patch back upstream.
I think collaboration on trying to solve a problem benefits from some actual problem solving, rather than just talking about what the problem might be and how it might be solved if so.
Because GPP is living in an imaginary world where there are no Linux drivers for smartcards.
Or in a real world where the integrated authentication is some kind of horrible proprietary thing that doesn't follow standards, which would rather prove the point about lock-in...
Yeah, my lot have to manage the transition to Windows 7 for a whole bunch of bespoke applications. We got shot of IE6 and heavens, we were glad, because our stupid timesheet software used ActiveX so we had to ditch that too.
The only thing really holding us back from moving to Linux is MS Office. The NHS had an enterprise-wide license, which a back-of-napkin estimate says must have cost on the order of £100M per year. That got dropped a while ago, I'm guessing because it was a big fat line item in the budget and made a ripe target for people saying "hey, what if we spent some small fraction of that on LibreOffice development?".
A lot of our bespoke apps are Java and thus don't really need Windows to work. Web apps are web apps.
But we, like everywhere, I suspect, have a large number of things cobbled together from VBA and spit, not to mention the things people do with Access. Any coherent plan to move to Linux, or even LibreOffice, needs a department dedicated to migrating VBA and Access applications.
I like this trend, but I think Open Government License is counterproductive Not-Invented-Hereism. It's basically a BSD-style license, but also contains an exhortation not to break British law.
Well, British law is already an exhortation not to break British law. You don't need an extra one. They should just use Apache 2 if they want a BSD-style license ; everyone's IP legal department already knows it.
People do use Skype for business reasons. Skype sells products for business reasons. I use Skype for business reasons (but my business is basically public knowledge anyway, so no need to steal it). Does the business version come without the back door? Didn't think so.
One of the major sticking points with ECHELON for many was not that it was used to spy on middle school gossip, but that it was used to pass corporate intelligence to favoured "partners of the state".
It's only a matter of time before the back door itself becomes one of those pieces of intelligence as well.
They were clearly just deep in the crust. Not only would the core still be too hot for life, even thousands of years after the 21st century, without a temperature differential they can't harvest the geothermal power for their systems ; ergo, they need to be close enough to the cold surface.
Don't think for a second that magically, everyone where you live will be immune to the "pick on that which is different than the norm" mentality.
Well, yeah, you're demonstrating that quite adequately. But where would we be as a race without people who think differently to the norm? Probably living in caves hunting things for meat.
It's a stepping stone - you've identified some of the problems with the idea of taping things up.
The next step would be thinking forward, not backwards.
If you know eliminating panel gaps improves fuel efficiency, why not fill the permanent gaps in the factory with some kind of coloured sealant that matches the paint?
For doors, what about inflatable seals that extend past the edges of the doors to fill the gaps? Or a rubber edge on the door that sits flush with the body panel when the door closes?
Better than just shouting "people are bastards, we hates them, hsssss".
Yeah, but what about...
* Panel gaps that aren't on doors (or on doors that you don't use)
You don't crack the bonnet every day. There will be panel gaps on the bumpers, etc. If you don't habitually have passengers in the rear seats, tape the door seals up. Three door models probably do much better than 5 doors models - but don't sell well in the American market because you have to be agile enough to climb into the back seat...
That's not our beef with it - our problem with choosing BSD-style licenses for our code is not that the original code disappears, it's twofold
i) We granted the freedom to use our code to the person receiving our software. We'd like the person receiving it to be good enough to do the same.
ii) We put effort into the code - possibly a large community has put in many man hours of work. It doesn't seem fair that a corporation could take that code, roll it into a product, and make a profit selling it, without contributing to the community that created it in the first place, but that is what BSD permits.
Incidentally, GPL permits this too - it's all about distribution of the software. If a corporation builds software on GPL code, they only have to share their changes with whoever they distribute to. That could be themselves, or just their customers.
What GPL doesn't permit is that you forbid the recipients of your software from redistributing it, and it doesn't allow you to withhold the source code from them. BSD style licenses allow you to add these restrictions, GPL does not.
So corporations love BSD licenses because it lets them get something for nothing, with no obligation to give anything back. There are still benefits in contribution to BSD licensed projects - like a reduced overhead, why maintain your patches when the community will do it for you?
I work for the UK government in software development - I happen to think that GPL is an appropriate license for all government-funded software. If the people are funding it, all the people ought to be able to continue to benefit from it. Of course, corporations don't see it this way and refuse to play ball if you mention it - so the most common license we use is APL2. It irks me that they get a free ride from my taxes. That's not capitalism, that's socialism - for corporations.
Cringeley (I think) wrote a column once that opined that Microsoft should just make Windows into a desktop environment for Linux, thereby gaining the services of a huge community of excellent kernel developers. It made a kind of sense.
Which is of course a lie. Just because I have GPL software on my Windows machine, does not mean I have to make any software I write open source.
I don't even have to make it so if I compile a C program with the gcc - a GPL compiler. It explicitly says this in the license.
The same applies to any GPL program - using it does not make the works you create with it GPL as well.
Just a massive bit of FUD. Ballmer should be thankful that there have been open-source developers writing programs that work on Windows, increasing the value of his platform at no cost to his corporation.
Yeah, I proved that to my own satisfaction when I was a kid. I painted the stitching on one of our deckchairs with a solution of biological detergent, operating on the hypothesis that if this stuff eats biological material, then it would rot the stitches. My grandfather fell through that chair the next day.