I really need to get some sleep, but I thought I would share this with you and let you form your own opinion about exactly what Bill is trying to say in a very recent MS share holders meeting.
To get to the part I am talking about you need to go to the bottom third of the page where Bill and other execs are fielding questions from investors/media.
Interestingly enough bill actually says "MR. GATES: Let me start out, really the reason that you see open source there at all is because we came in and said there should be a platform that's identical with millions and millions of machines, and the bios of that should be open to everybody to use, and all the extensibility should be there. And so it was very predictable that once we had gotten the PC going, and going and gotten hundreds of millions of machines out there, that it had always been sort of free software and the universities would flourish and there would be more of that."
http://www.microsoft.com/msft/speech...rmeeting01.htm
