Re: [school-discuss] M$ SELLING OS, balloonists, SFU

[Leon Brooks <leon@brooks.fdns.net>]

On Sat, 20 Mar 2004 00:26, Tom Adelstein wrote:
> This reminds me of a the story of the ballonist lost in the fog,
> lowers the ballon to find lawyers playing golf.  The ballonists asks
> where are we and the golfer says over the 16th green.

...and asks for the balloonist's address so he has somewhere to send the 
bill for advice...

> That may be correct but it doesn't help the ballonist does it?

Ironically enough, there is a similar long-standing airplane-lost-in-fog 
joke lampooning Microsoft's tech support, e.g.:

    http://lalaland.cl.msu.edu/~vanhoose/humor/0521.html

Also, Microsoft do sell (well, mostly give away now) SFU, which has a 
large FOSS component:

    http://www.microsoft.com/windows/sfu/default.asp

This doesn't make them a FOSS company, and nor do the massive initial 
infusions of BSD tech (e.g. practically all of their networking tools, 
ping, the FTP client and so on) into Windows, but they do use and sell 
FOSS and ex-FOSS themselves, and (as of the release of Windows 2000) 
even according to the licence terms.

Cheers; Leon