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Comment by hipsterrific | Hacker News Reader

Ballmer was good at sales but horrible at running a company. He was perfect before the internet came to be and before the rise of mobile devices. Ballmer, is in fact, what sunk Microsoft for a better part of a decade or more.

Nadella is doing MS good. For one, he understands market dynamics better than Ballmer did and is willing to gamble. As a C# developer of 10 years, this is the first time Microsoft actually "spiced up" their product line. Offering up robust tooling like Visual Studio Community (which is just a free version of Professional) shows me Microsoft is committed to the platform. Now, with Visual Studio Code, it will make my work better since I'm 99% on a Mac these days. The next few months will be interesting. :)

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> Open source is not available to commercial companies. The way the license is written, if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source. If the government wants to put something in the public domain, it should. Linux is not in the public domain. Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. That's the way that the license works.

- Ballmer, 2001

Yeah Ballmer was pretty bad, but to be fair Bill Gates also was very anti open-source ("Communism! Communism!"... http://old.seattletimes.com/html/microsoft/2002152694_paul13...). I like the direction of this "new Microsoft", but they still do some nasty stuff: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/03/20/win...

Is he wrong about the GPL? It actually does what he is talking about by design. Every company which uses GPL code is very careful about how they do so. A lot won't touch GPLv3 because of the newer restrictions. AGPL as well.

> Is he wrong about the GPL?

Yes, even if he was talking about the GPL when he said "open source software", he would be wrong. (And if he meant the GPL, he would be wrong in using the general term "open source software" in referring to it, even if his statements were accurate for the GPL.)

> It actually does what he is talking about by design.

No it doesn't. He says "if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source." You can use GPL software without making your other software GPL. You can distribute GPL software without making your other software GPL. You can distribute GPL software without making other software you distribute together with the GPL software GPL, too, in some cases.

> Every company which uses GPL code is very careful about how they do so.

Many of them also produce a lot of non-GPL software. Which demonstrates that the "all your other software" claim is false.

He directly referenced Linux which is famously under GPLv2. You can argue with this wording if you like, but his observation is spot on and it's obvious to those are not unduly biased that he was speaking about the GPL and the licenses that were similar to it.

> He directly referenced Linux which is famously under GPLv2.

Sure, he used it as an example, but he also explicitly made a generality about open source software, not the GPLv2. In any case, what he said was wrong about Linux, wrong about the GPL (including GPLv2), and wrong about open source software, so arguing over which of those he was talking about is a sideshow.

> You can argue with this wording if you like, but his observation is spot on

No, its absolutely, completely false. You can use -- or even distribute -- "open source software" (or GPL software, or Linux specifically) without "all your other software" being required to become open source.

By use it is pretty obvious he meant incorporate it as part of their products (ex. utilize a GPL library). Microsoft is a software development shop after all.

It seems to me like he was purposefully taking a hard political stance on a nuanced issue in order to drive people who are uninformed or unsure about these things into his own company's pen. It has nothing to do with linux, GPL, or any technicality, and everything to do with perceptions, executive policy, and business culture.

perhaps, but he was referring to the GPL, and this particular discussion started because one poster asked roughly "wasn't he being accurate"?

And the answer is yes.

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...

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.

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?

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.

> 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.

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

No, you can use Linux without having to open source the stuff you run on Linux. That is not an accurate observation by any stretch of the imagination.

"After a year and a half of public consultation, thousands of comments, and four drafts, version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GPLv3) was finally published on June 29, 2007."

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.html

Regardless of what one thinks about GPLv3, Ballmer could not possibly have been talking about it in 2001.

He is right about GPL. But there is a loop hole behind it, which all the open source companies use it. If the software is behind a web UI it does not need to be released back as a open source. Thats how all other big companies like Google, Facebook does not need to open source their source code back.

Using code is very distinct from using software (which Balmer referred to).

> Ballmer was good at sales but horrible at running a company

From Wikipedia:

Under Ballmer's tenure as CEO, Microsoft's annual revenue surged from $25 billion to $70 billion, while its net income increased 215 percent to $23 billion

May all companies suffer equally incompetent CEOs.

Over the same period Apple was going from $8 billion to $182 billion in revenue and Google was going from $3 billion to $66 billion in revenue.

You could say the pie was just getting a lot bigger. Why should one company be expected to eat it all?

Google is a completely unfair comparison as that was their prime growth stage.

No doubt Microsoft under ballmer launched quite a few failed products, but they've maintained their monopolies and have made record profits in the process.

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