They act like gangsters…

I’ve been meaning to draw something like this for a couple of weeks now. It’s a little late, but I finally got around to it.

Here’s your license agreement for this image: take it and post it wherever you’d like on this big, wide internet. Just leave the attribution there on the left side (next to Bill Gates, appropriately enough since it’s a claim of intellectual property). If you’d like a high-res version of this, we can make other arrangement$. The original has already been spoken for.

For those not in the know, a couple of weeks ago Steve Ballmer essentially threatened the emerging Asian economies by saying that if they use Linux, they’ll get sued for the patent infringements in it. Microsoft has since backpedaled, saying SOMEONE might sue them, but not US… obviously they’re just looking for a better threat with which to extort potential Linux users.

I’m glad I get to draw pictures about this crap instead of having to actually respond to it in an official capacity.

–Howard

12 thoughts on “They act like gangsters…”

    1. I was pleased with how he came out. Ballmer actually looks pretty good too. Here’s a nice headshot you can use for comparison:

      (A nicer headshot might be one that’s taken with something more substantial than a camera, but I’m not going to start advocating violence as a solution to corporate greed.)

      –Howard

  1. Boy, talk about FUD.

    I’m not exactly a huge fan of Linux (find it annoying and am going to try BSD in the hopes it’s less…messy) but that shit fucking sucks.

    1. Not sure what you mean by “messy”, but you might want to give Gentoo a look if you haven’t already. It’s Linux, but influenced by BSD. I absolutely love the portage system for installing programs. Now if you find Linux “messy” in terms of licensing, or development, I’m sure Gentoo isn’t any better, but package management was always my biggest issue with other Linux distros.

      1. Yeah, it’s the dev I find messy.

        Gentoo was alright, but frankly when you put an inexperienced user like myself in charge of quality control when I’m compiling the binaries, severely Not Nice Things are going to happen as a result. Which is why I’d prefer the FreeBSD ports – the compile options are made by people who know what they’re doing better than I do.

  2. It’s caricature. Tall skinny guy, short fat guy, both dressed as mafiosos. Besides, while most folks know Ballmer as a fat guy (“developers, developers, developers, developers”), not many have seen Ballmer and Gates side-by-side.

    Giving him a dumb look is FUNNIER (and obviously deliberate). Ballmers’ statements at the ASGL conference (did I get the acronym right?) seem pretty dumb. Microsoft THREATENING attendees at an event they sponsored… attendees who RUN ENTIRE COUNTRIES. Wow.

    –Howard

    1. I still can’t help chuckling about the claims Ballmer made, back when the DOJ’s antitrust proceedings, that Microsoft had to be “free to innovate” with its products.

      What, they were suddenly going to start just then, after spending decades shamelessly buying, borrowing and stealing ideas, technologies and entire products from their competition? Or, failing that, crushing them in its iron fist? 9.9

      That Ballmer, master of unintentional irony.

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