That's a quarter of the value of the world's leading closed-source software company evaporated into thin air. I feel awful for Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Rick Belluzzo, Jim Allchin and the rest of the guys. You know their personal portfolios are in the dumper. It's a crying shame.
Information wants to be free.
As near as anyone can tell, it was Whole Earth Catalog publisher Stewart Brand who said it first, speaking at the first annual Hackers' Conference in 1984. The slogan proved catchy. It was quickly adopted by hackers at the MIT Media Lab, by Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman and by thousands of free-software hackers. Among the most durable misapprehensions postponing the dawn of the Open-Source Age must be the notion that when software is free, it means that programmers will not be paid. In fact, they never did.