By James Cooley - July 06 2006 tags: business firefox

A pretty intresting read in Q&A with Firefox's Blake Ross: Extended version - Todd Bishop's Microsoft Blog @ SeattlePI.com. He makes the point so, for example, if you look at Microsoft, even if there were engineers inside the company who wanted to continue work on Internet Explorer (several years ago) -- which I'm sure there were, because they're not evil people -- they couldn't do it, because the company disbanded the team. If you wanted to work on IE, you could not do that at the company's directive.. I suppose with free software someone can fix bugs to halt software decay i.e. if you use proprietary software you better be sure that the company has an attractive revenue stream from it. Ross says The truth is I think Microsoft is very directly responsible for spyware and adware and the pop-up ads in general that proliferated across the Web after they abandoned their product. I mean, this is the world's most-used software application ever ... and I just think it's irresponsible for a company to abandon it simply because they can't find a financial incentive to continue development on it.