I remain utterly convinced that before the end of this decade Microsoft will be a major player in the market for open source solutions. Of cource, Microsoft will do all it can to extract all the juice it can from its current monopolized businesses. But they know that this cannot hold and they will want to be a player in tomorrow’s markets for IT.

Ballmer shopping for open-source companies. Who’s for sale?: “

Sometimes I read things like this and I’m relieved to find out that Steve Ballmer isn’t completely deluded by proprietary ideology. Speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit today, Ballmer made it clear that his vendetta against open source isn’t as all-encompassing as he sometimes makes it out to be:

‘We will do some buying of companies that are built around open-source products,’ Ballmer said during an onstage interview at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

A refusal to consider acquisitions of open-source developers ‘would take us out of the acquisition market quite dramatically,’ Ballmer said — a tacit acknowledgment of how thoroughly open-source development has reshaped the software market.

…”

(Via The Open Road.)

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