Fergie's Tech Blog

Microsoft tries, and fails, to recruit open-source guru

My favorite Snark (Eric Raymond) quote from this article:

"What were you going to do with the rest of your afternoon, offer jobs to Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds? Or were you going to stick to something easier, like talking Pope Benedict into presiding at a Satanist orgy?" he wrote. "I’ve in fact been something pretty close to your company’s worst nightmare since about 1997."

Microsoft may be softening its rhetoric against Linux and open-source software, but that doesn't mean the company is ever going to be able to hire Eric Raymond. Earlier this week, a recruiter from the software giant tried to lure Raymond, one of the open-source movement's most visible boosters, Raymond said in an interview Friday.

On Thursday, Raymond received an e-mail pitch from a Microsoft recruiter asking him if he'd be interested in discussing a position with the software company.

The open-source advocate said he never gave the offer any serious consideration. "I thought it was an utterly ludicrous offer that deserved nothing but a ludicrous response," he said.

Raymond, one of the founders of the Open Source Initiative group that defined the term "open source," has been a constant and very vocal critic of the software vendor. He has also published a number of confidential Microsoft memos, dubbed the Halloween Documents, which have shed light into Microsoft's campaign against Linux and open-source software.

posted by Fergie @ 9/09/2005 01:40:00 PM