From slashdot
quote:
Eric S. Raymond, the well known Open Source Evangelist, recently received a job offer from Microsoft, that he strongly refused.
Here's a sample of how he replied
quote:
I'd thank you for your offer of employment at Microsoft, except
that it indicates that either you or your research team (or both)
couldn't get a clue if it were pounded into you with baseball bats.
What were you going to do with the rest of your afternoon, offer jobs
to Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds? Or were you going to stick to something easier, like talking Pope Benedict into presiding at a
Satanist orgy?
If you had bothered to do five seconds of background checking, you
might have discovered that I am the guy who responded to Craig
Mundie's "Who are you?" with "I'm your worst nightmare", and that I've in fact been something pretty close to your company's worst nightmare since about 1997. You've maybe heard about this "open source" thing?
[snip, snip]
On the day *I* go to work for Microsoft, faint oinking sounds will be
heard from far overhead, the moon will not merely turn blue but
develop polkadots, and hell will freeze over so solid the brimstone
will go superconductive.
People should note that Eric Raymond was quite polite to the guy on the phone and was told that his name had come from the research team. Eric Raymond suggested that a joke was being played, and promised a full explanation by email, which is where that quote is from.
If you don't know who Eric S. Raymod is and you want to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond
http://www.google.com/search?q=Eric+S+Raymond&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
I have big issues with his stances on guns and the war in Iraq.
Whatever else people think and say about him he is one hell of a programmer, and he's the guy who made the halloween documents public (internal microsoft memos, proved genuine, about their long-term strategies for dealing with Linux and open source software) http://www.opensource.org/halloween/