Dear board
I think it's worth reading Steve Ballmer's comments in full here: http://www.betanews.com/article/Microsoft_Scrambling_to_Explain_Ballmer_Comm...
The two key quotes are:
"We happen to believe in what I'll call a commercial model for us, because it's a little hard to rent the office space here unless we have revenue, etc. But that doesn't mean there's one model that inherits the Earth. We're saying as a commercial enterprise, we're engaged in commercial software; there'll be other people who will choose, for whatever set of reasons, and with whatever set of business objectives, to engage in an open source approach."
"There are plenty of other people who may also have intellectual property. And every time an Eolas comes to Microsoft and says, "Pay us," I suspect they also would like to eventually go to the open source world. So getting what I'll call an intellectual property interoperability framework between the two worlds I think is important."
What's interesting here is that he's using the language of commercial vs Free Software, thus suggesting that companies engaging with Free Software do not place a commercial proposition in their development and deployment, a manifestly untrue statement.
Secondly, his second quote suggests that paying Microsoft for undeclared patents is an "interoperability framework" for business.
There is quite a lot of overlap regarding the language he is using and the language we will use to launch CO. We need to ensure that we take this into account during the publicity phase.
Shane