[extropy-chat] The Internet: a commie, socialist conspiracy!

[Eugen Leitl]

On Tue, Nov 22, 2005 at 07:58:20PM +0800, Jack Parkinson wrote:

> "This month, SAP's Shai Agassi referred to open-source software as 
> "intellectual property socialism." In January, Bill Gates suggested that 

Yes, they're stealing *YOUR* intellectual property (I presume, by advanced
neurosurgery) so that you don't have it anymore. Then, ARRRR Matey!,
they redistribute it to evil (not at all like Jack Sparrow) pirates.

> free-software developers are communists. A few years earlier, Microsoft CEO 
> Steve Ballmer called the open-source operating system Linux "a cancer." 

Open sores cancer, man! Time for some serious chemo. Maybe that's why
Ballmer's head is like a billiard ball.

> Considering what these guys say in public, I wonder what dark words they 
> utter in private-that al-Qaida uses open-source software to plot terrorist 
> attacks?"
> 
> "The Web owes its existence to open source: Both the first text browser and 
> the first graphical browser, Mosaic, were open-source projects. About 70 
> percent of the world's Web servers run on Apache, which powers some 50 
> million sites. If it weren't for free open-source software, companies like 
> Amazon, Google, and Yahoo!-all of which run Linux-might never have got off 

Not only Linux, but Perl and Python, and Apache, and a gadzillion of others.
And we can safely omit the "might". It would never have happened, period.

> the ground. Google, for example, uses an estimated 170,000 servers to power 
> its search engines. If it used Microsoft Web server software-around $500 
> per computer in licensing fees-that would create an annual bill of about 
> $85 million. That wouldn't put a dent in Google's budget today, but Sergey 
> Brin and Larry Page never would have been able to start their company if 
> they had had to pay those kinds of fees up front."

Nevermind that Redmond doesn't make server operating systems. They only
wish they could.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820            http://www.leitl.org
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