Darryl posted about an interview with Steve Balmer and the subsequent flood of slashdot abuse.

I watched the video.  It's nice to actually see Mr Balmer speaking - albeit for such a short interview. It's gratifying to witness his obvious devotion to developers.  It gave me a brief warm fuzzy feeling.

However, I also read some of the crap that slashdot posters said about his comments on open source and innovation.  There's no point to replying on slashdot, no point at all, so I'm doing it here.

Open Source is good. MS knows this.  They are a significant provider of open source code - just look at MSDN for a while, what about www.ASP.Net, www.GotDotNet.com, www.WinForms.net?  To say that MS doesn't understand or 'get it' is just plain silly.

From a business point of view, GPL and it's ilk are the devils spawn and stiffle innovation.  MS also knows this.  As a large (or small) company it would be extremely unwise to use any code that is covered by GPL.  For MS, this is a huge threat.  There are squillions of eager lawyers just waiting for the smallest infringement.