FSF, Microsoft announce merger

[Peter Seebach]

In what is likely to be hailed as a landmark of the computer industry,
Richard Stallman, of the Free Software Foundation, and Bill Gates,
of Microsoft, announced that they would be concluding a merger within
a year, setting a target date of April 1st, 1997.

"It's all been a horrible misunderstanding", says Stallman, a long time
advocate of free software.

"It's really just a semantic thing", says Gates. "We call software free
when the vendor has to bundle it with the machine and swallow the expense,
or they don't get sales. Stallman calls it free when the vendor can't
bundle it with the machine and pass the expenses on to you. It really
comes down to the same thing, and that's market share."

The first visible products of this merger will be "Hurd '97", to be released
by 3Q1998, and "Hello '96", which will be a replacement product for
Windows For Workgroups. Gates comments, "the mail reader is brilliant;
I wish we'd had these people with us all along."

The two met inside Westminster Cathedral, where they embraced, and
called each other "anathema", the Latin for "brother".

-s
--
Peter Seebach - se...@solon.com - Copyright 1996 Peter Seebach.
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