Steve Ballmer & Open Source

Steve Ballmer likes to bamboozle people. 'Open source - you can never know who wrote it', says the Lord of Lard. But what does it matter who wrote it? You can read open source - you can't read Microsoft code.

Most of Apple's Darwin comes from Berkeley, CMU, and NeXT - and each and every file is so marked.

Berkeley Sockets, the mainstay of the Internet and its protocols, and which Microsoft 'borrowed' to make their own bastardised version so they could connect their wobbly and ramshackle Windows to the Internet, has its source code files all clearly marked.

/*
 * Copyright (c) 1990, 1991, 1993
 *	The Regents of the University of California.  All rights reserved.
 */

Apple have their own mark; so do CMU and NeXT. In fact, this is one thing that distinguishes collaborative open source and Unix projects from Microsoft's: the former are proud to put their names out; the latter hope they're never found.

Darwin files are clearly marked with not only their copyright holders (the companies) but their authors - and, more importantly, their history of development.

Apple have millions of lines of code online in production source, sample code, and tutorials. The author is always clearly marked. Microsoft have sample code available only for a price, and the author is never marked.

A few choice samples from the 1,500+ files on a typical developers disk. [Note: this is no news for developers - at least developers not imprisoned by Microsoft - the article is only for the edification of the casual user who could not otherwise know how badly Steve Ballmer is, as per usual, lying through his teeth.]