Daniel Robbins hired by M$

[bob]

This new "hire and silence" strategy on the part of Microsoft actually stands 
a good chance of slowing the open source movement.     In reality it is a 
small variation on their embrace and extend practices of time gone past.

Like it or not the life blood of our open source movement rests with the 
independent developers who create the stuff in the first place.

Microsoft certainly has the $ to "hire and silence" a great deal of the key 
people in the open source movement if it truely wanted to.      The fact is 
that they wouldn't have to hire very many to make the strategy effective ... 
they would just have to poach some key people.

Can't fault those who take Microsoft up on their offers either ... all 
developers have to eat ... and why should lawyers be the only ones making any 
money.

bob



On June 14, 2005 09:51 am, you wrote:
> I don't know if anyone noticed on slashdot this morning, but Daniel
> Robbins, founder of Gentoo Linux has recently been hired by Microsoft.
>
> I guess it's not surprising, considering that one of MS's many business
> strategies has usually been to buy out / reverse engineer any
> competition or new ideas. Gentoo is mainly know for using portage - a
> sophisticated dependency tree and package management system.
>
> I suppose the person who originally came up with the idea for BSD's
> ports would have had an offer if BSD had been as popular w/ the masses
> as Linux.
>
> As much as i feel that he's 'crossed over to the dark side', I'm still
> somewhat glad that he's transferred all of his intellectual property
> rights to the gentoo foundation.
>
>
> Any thoughts?
>
>
> ~/Chris

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