smackfoo.com | I find your lack of faith disturbing.

I am Steve, hear me roar.

The ‘cold-war’ between Ballmer and the Open Source movement that has raged on and on and on, continues to escalate as the “Ballmer rhetoric engine” version 2.0 picks up speed.

It’s come to many in the Linux community’s attention you have claimed again and again, that Linux violates Microsoft’s intellectual property. Not only that, but it’s been reported Microsoft has convinced businesses to pay for a Linux patent that you can’t provide. #

The Open Letter has already garnered some responses, indeed everyone from Redhat to Novell has weighed in on the topic. And it’s all very reminiscent of the utter shambles that SCO versus Linux has become, where SCO has yet to actually prove to anyone that it has any kind of IP or ownership of any Linux Kernel source code.

It’s hardly surprising Microsoft backed SCO when, obviously, Ballmer has a bone to pick with the Open Source Community. Given Microsoft is the epitome of proprietary, you can well expect their ‘claims’ to be shrouded behind the usual “we cannot declare the code used, because it’s protected, obviously” mantra that, despite some inexplicable moments of openness from Redmond, still pervades Microsoft’s modus operandi.

With Ballmer’s increasing aggressive tirades against anyone whom he believes is ‘evil’, it is becoming apparent, at least to this author, that Steve is at risk of simply becoming irrelevant, as the entire world marches towards a more open application framework, which is increasingly focused towards inter-operable web based technologies - with code and ideas flowing in many different directions.

Whilst Gates is aware technology and applications are very much becoming more web centric, Ballmer is absolutely chained to the past and seeks to bring back the good old days of proprietary-inside^tm, where they had a complete strangle hold on much of the consumer market.

Those days are fast coming to an end, as emerging technologies are less focused on Operating Systems and more focused on a shared online vision.