The press loves a David & Goliath "war" of any kind. Bill Gates has played the Goliath role for quite a while, of course, but the Davids come and go. For most of the late 90s, David was played by Netscape's Marc Andreesen. Now Linus Torvalds has been cast in the David role.
Thus the headlines read like a play-by-play fight between Linus and Bill, or Linus and other big/bad tribal chieftans. Here at Linux Journal we found ourselves supplying material for this sports story when we hosted LinuxForSuits: The Linux and Open Source Executive Forum at Internet World on October 6 of last year.
"Microsoft has been talking a lot about opening up their own code. Whether or not they actually do that is a pretty big question; but if they should do that, what does it mean for Linux?"
"I'd like to start off by saying talk is cheap, and I think it is a fairly theoretical question. However, as a theoretical question, I'd be more than happy to see more and more people open up their source. I'm not convinced for example, that the Sun community license is a very good license. But it still makes me very happy to see that Sun is opening up and making their knowledge available to others. And if Microsoft were to open up, I'd be more than thrilled. I don't think it is very likely or if it's likely, it will be likely in niche markets. I think people think there is more of a Microsoft bigotry in the Linux community than there really is. I'm more than happy to use Microsoft products. It is just that I am selective about the products I want to use. For example, I've always liked PowerPoint, I've always thought that Visual Basic was a good product; it's just been hard to use them because I've always thought the platforms they run on aren't good enough. I used to do my slides with PowerPoint for the longest time with a Windows Installation package. This is true, I find of all the developers I'm in contact with, that maybe we take up Microsoft as a bad example in specific areas, but we're not as anti-Microsoft as the press makes us seem."
[Find the full transcript on the Linux Journal site at http://www2.linuxjournal.com/articles/conversations/006B.html — or listen to the whole day's proceedings at the ON24.com site. Go to http://www.on24.com and find it among the Linux search listings.]