Hacker News Reader

What does that even mean? Like, Paul Allen should just pay for all the expenses Microsoft incurs to develop its products and then Microsoft can give them all away for free instead? That will work out great. Paul Allen can pay for everything for a few months and then he can run out of money and Microsoft can shut down and lay off 110K employees, 200K with contractors factored in.

View on HN

Just like GNU/Linux he could release the whole thing is a community developed software

Sure, he could do that if he had any kind of legal right to do so, which he does not. If all of Paul Allen's net worth were in Microsoft stock (and it certainly is not), he'd own less than 5% of the company at this point. Paul Allen couldn't release all of Microsoft's code any more than I could.

And of course, even if it were possible, Microsoft would need to come up with a new way to generate the 87 billion dollars in revenue it just lost, or else lay off 200 thousand people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com