Ballmer gets it wrong, again.

Ballmer: Linux users owe Microsoft He says the open-source operating system infringes on his company's intellectual property Eric Lai November 16, 2006 (Computerworld) -- In comments confirming the open-source community's suspicions, Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer today declared his belief that the Linux operating system infringes on Microsoft's intellectual property. (ComputerWorld)

Over the course of his employment with Microsoft, Steve Ballmer has said some pretty inflammatory things, but I think this just about takes the top prize and is nothing more than arrogance. Microsoft has not been able to find a way to keep Linux and other Open Source systems out of the corporate data centre and it is finally beginning to dawn on them that Vista and Longhorn are not the "gift" to IT that the hacks inside Redmond have convinced them they are, so in an effort to smother the competition, they are going to buy it.

SCO has already tried the "sue the users" route, and it cost them the company. Novell, who should know better, even BOUGHT the rights to the UNIX name and then handed them over to the Open Source community. So Microsoft knows exactly what they are doing. This is not the first time they have tried to enforce their view of the world on the rest of the industry, but this time, they may actually get their way. What is truly sad about his comments is that rather than working with the community and prospering, this could be the beginning of the end. The European Union and its member countries have already begun asking hard questions about the need for Microsoft and its products and even in the United States, there is a slow shift away from the "Microsoft" solution to a solution that actually solves the problem. In the end, it really is too bad, because as Red Hat has proven, it is not the software that makes you the money, it is the service and support of the systems it is running on.

What is even more ironic is that there are already exploits on the Net for the most recent round of patches. I do not know what could be more indicative of the true power of the community than that?