Interview: Ballmer: No sleep lost over Linux
C|Net | at | by Mike
Steve Ballmer had the stage to himself Thursday in San Francisco as he introduced Windows Server 2003, a new version of the company's server operating system that Microsoft's CEO described as "the right product" to help companies stretch their IT budgets.
Q: In the past you've used strong words like "cancer" to describe Linux. There is the un-American comment from a colleague about GPL (General Public License) and open source. Are you backing off from that position and taking more of a technological or business view?
I think there are many parts of the discussion. I do think there are things that people don't understand very well about the new alternative, where it is important for us to help customers understand the issues.
The way things are structured today, from a licensing perspective, in the Linux world nobody will ever commercialize Linux the way the Sun commercialized FreeBSD. For some customers, that can be viewed as advantageous. But customers will never really know who stands behind this product. If the lead developer for this component chooses to do something else with his life, who will carry on the mantle for that? The fact that it will never be commercialized is assured by the GPL. The GPL licensing form does that, as opposed to the open-source license for FreeBSD, where you could say Sun took it and commercialized it and can say that they own it. Nobody can ever do that (with GPL).