Sublime

But another turn of the tech cycle would arrive, and as Microsoft grew more powerful, a sect of programmer activists struck back by forming the open-source software movement. As Tim O’Reilly, the tech publishing magnate, described the situation in his 1998 blog post “Freeware: The Heart & Soul of the Internet,” “Despite all Microsoft’s efforts

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Google founder and computer scientist Larry Page said any law more than fifty years old has to be re-examined. Any law written before the internet needs to get re-examined, or it’s going to collapse.

As billionaire PayPal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel put it: [You] probably won’t have a bunch of equally good distribution strategies. Engineers frequently fall victim to this because they do not understand distribution. Since they don’t know what works, and haven’t thought about it, they try some sales, BD, advertising, and viral

Kevin Harvey took the view that Red Hat could avoid a frontal challenge to Microsoft’s business model; he worked to reposition the company away from the business of selling packaged software in boxes (Harvey’s old business) and move it toward providing support services and a central website for the Linux community. The only way Microsoft could comp

When Sam saw the response to the Forbes billionaires list, and the Forbes cover that followed, any doubts he had about the value of public relations evaporated. Natalie’s job became both simpler and more complicated. Simpler, because basically everyone now wanted to talk to Sam, and Sam was game to talk to anyone—so long as he could play a video ga