Yesterday, at Microsoft's London office, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer attacked Linux and open source.

In a Q&A, Ballmer started his warm-up session by accusing Google: „They read your mail, we don't“.

As for Microsoft and open-source, he said: „There will be other models for software. No one model will inherit the earth. We believe in the commercial software model“.

After that he went on attacking open-source and Red Hat, saying: The only other thing I would say that is probably germane is we spend a lot of money ... on R & D," he said. "We've spent a lot of money licensing patents, when people come to us and say, 'Hey, this commercial piece of software violates our patent, our intellectual property, we'll either get a court judgment or we'll pay a big check. "

For someone who is dedicated to bringing „the best to our customers“, and “taking them „where they want to go today“, he appears to be mighty concerned about a bussines model that requires no paying. We're not saying that a single model will not inherit the earth – we just hope Linux survives the Microsoft onslaught, because it still IS an OS of the (still) free people.

You can read more here.