Will Bill Gates’ departure usher in open source friendly era at Microsoft?
Submitted by srlinuxx on Thu, 06/26/2008 - 05:14.
Will Microsoft become more open to open source with the departure of Bill Gates?
It’s a tough call. Observers from both the open and closed source worlds say the exit of Microsoft’s longtime leader won’t usher in a GPL era at the company but it will likely accelerate what is already a changing attitude in Redmond.
“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.”
Gates’ exit will help acceptance of open source, another observer said.
Gates may stay ? Wife can give away money fast but not more?
Warren Buffett got both Gates to think more money can be given away faster, so Bill thought about retirement. What Warren failed to understand is that the world is richer, when governments print more money to give to their citizens. Underdeveloped countries are spending more.
Before Gates started to talk about retirement, a whole new slate of management were hired. Yes, it is cloud computing with big data centers. Yahoo can fill up some of those data centers.
Now, matrix switching will be the rage, and Bill probably had to stay to guide the data center project, filled up with 6,000 channels of MSN.com media data downloads for DTV and cable/telco/TVs. What, with the speed of edgeQam transmission equipment?
In the mean time, Warren is going around the world looking for businesses to buy, hoping the economy will scare people to sell. But even the Feds see stability beyond a few Wall street derivative gambling fraud cases.
Footnote:
An hour long movie can be downloaded to cableTV office for on-demand customers in 3.5 minutes. 3.5 minutes is time enough to pay for view. Cable video servers do not have to inventory less popular movies. Microsoft has to package their media for half hour re-runs.