Slashdot Mirror
Cringely On Gates' Free Software Connection
cworley writes: "Slashdot
recently reported
on Gates' paternity claims over Open Source at a recent shareholders meeting.
Although Gates' actual statement didn't make a great deal of sense,
it looked as an attempt to revise history to portray himself as the creator
of Open Source by initiating the PC's open architecture (or reverse engineering
the BIOS to wrestle exclusive control of PC system sales from IBM). In
Cringely's
weekly article, he attempts to find the truth in Gates' statement.
IBM's Jack Sams provides an historical perspective of Gates' role in the
genesis of the PC's open architecture.
"
It is true that Microsoft's contract with IBM, which stipulated that Microsoft could sell its operating system software to whomever it wanted, allowed Microsoft's creation of a universal operating system which would run on any computer similar to those made by IBM. The popularity of this idea caused other companies to build IBM compatible parts, which started the open system architecture revolution of the mid-to-late 1980's.
However, Microsoft did not intend to create a level playing field for hardware manufacturers. It did not produce an operating system which would run on a machine which could conceivably be made by any company for the purpose of promoting creativity and competition between hardware manufacturers. Microsoft did what it did so that it could sell as many copies of its operating system as possible. It is hard to believe that a person as anticompetitive as bill gates would claim to have idealistically started the open hardware architecture revolution with the intent of benefiting science or computing or whatever by opening the doors to new influences. This is beyond hypocrisy.
Microsoft may have played a large role in setting architecture standards with its operating system, but it did so to make a profit, and any benefits to technology ensuing from the hordes of companies who began to make IBM compatible hardware and compete with each other were a side effect to Microsoft's bottom line.
Open Source software, on the other hand, has the benefit of everyone in mind and is notoriously bad at producing a profit.
I'll believe Bill when he begins to merrily distribute Microsoft system code, philanthropist that he is.
Linux, at least, was created as a free alternative to UNIX. It had nothing to do with Microsoft products.
The GNU tools were also free alternatives to UNIX tools that wound up integrated into Linux (and others). Again, nothing to do with Microsoft.
At the same time though, OSS thrives on competition. MS can bring it on.
"Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence." -T.S. Eliot
In that era, there was no internet, so there was no easy way to exchange free software even if you wrote some. There were BBS systems, but they were mostly local, not national or international. If you wanted to network two microcomputers together, you went to Radio Shack, bought a cable and a couple of DB connectors, and got a friend to show you which lines to cross and which pins to solder together with a paperclip.
There was a tiny population of hobbyists who would write code and give copies to each other at users' group meetings, but it wasn't big or visible -- as a teenaged computer hobbyist in 1980, I wasn't even aware it existed. Actually, that scene was probably smaller in percentage terms than it had been in the days of the Altair, etc., because there was starting to be commercial software that you could buy, rather than having to depend on other hobbyists. It was considered a good thing that you could buy a game at Radio Shack on a floppy, instead of having to write one yourself or type it in out of a listing in a magazine.
Copyleft hadn't been invented, and "open source" would have been a derogatory term. Lots of software was sold as BASIC source code, but not the high-quality business and OS stuff, just games. Yes, it was cool being able to buy a commercially produced game and examine and modify the source code, but those machines were so slow that anything in an interpreted language would run really slow. The really good software was all written in assembly language, which meant it was fast. (There were good compilers for CP/M, but the development tools were a lot more limited on the more popular consumer computers like TRS-80's, Apple II's, and Commodores.)
What was different and good about Mac and PC-DOS was that the hardware manufacturers didn't try to maintain a monopoly on the application software market, as Radio Shack, for instance, had tried to do.
Find free books.
He made the SW dominate the HW. You have to make HW that can run his SW or you are DOA. The rise of OSS was an unintended consequence, but there is a causal relationship.
Now that BG has this "little problem" with OSS, he has a solution: XBOX. If XBOX turns into a PC, it fragments the HW market which will allow BG to sell different versions of Windows for different architectures, providing a logical set of divisions for MSFT so that the next time the DOJ tries to break them up it can be done in a manner similar to the ATT breakup--very beneficial to shareholders who end up with shares in all the major industry players who must sell more product because competition leads to overlapping purchases. If XBOX does not become a PC, BG just sits on his existing market and/or reaps game and DVD profits. Either way, he wins. This guy is so smart he has you knocked out before you even know you are in the ring and that there is a boxing match. He's 50 moves ahead of your game. You are checkmated before the board is even set up. He makes the rules! The OSS people are foolish to think they have any chance of competing.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I read the original statement, and, frankly, it didn't sound to me like Gates was claiming credit for Open Source. What he said was that if it hadn't been for M$ standardizing computing with DOS, there wouldn't be a market for Open Source now. However much I may disagree with M$ policies and coding today, I would tend to agree with the thought behind that statement.
If you agree with that statement, you're simply wrong. In markets with a single CPU architecture and operating system (VAX -> VMS, SPARC -> Solaris, x86 -> MS-DOS) people just trade executables, they don't for the most part bother with source. You only need source in markets with a variety of CPU architectures and/or operating systems. The ideas behind Open Source were conceived in an environment of many, often propietary operating systems and CPU architectures, pre-1989, pre MS-DOS dominance. The economies of scale that caused cheap Pee Cee hardware have little or nothing to do with Open Source.
This is a fairly blatant case of a false dichotomy. This basically implies that Gates and Microsoft created the current platform industry standard, but without Gates we would still be using punchcards and mainframes. This is, of course, ridiculous.
Microsoft has a long history of crushing competition, of course, even before it was Microsoft. We all know how DR-DOS, the main competitor back-in-the-day, ended up. Without Gates, DR-DOS would likely have been the operating system of the x86. Microsoft did not invent MS-DOS, either, as we all know (being bought from the QDOS people). Microsoft did not invent the home computer either, that was Atari, or Commodore, or even Apple.
In short, Microsoft has never made an original move in its existance that would indicate that, without its presence, the technology and market conditions would be the same or better than they currently are.
There is always someone else.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Digital Equipment started the open architecture thing with the PDP series in the '60's when most of these characters were still bed-wetters. http://www.faqs.org/faqs/dec-faq/pdp8/
/mbr), much less release a complete list of the system calls.
...grumble
I worked for Burroughs in the '70's. If you had one you got the source code for the OS (Burroughs MCP) and source for just about everything that went with it. It wasn't free, and you couldn't republish it, but you could (and many did) modify and recompile it to suit yourself. But, I digress. Digital really gets the credit.
These guys all know this history and are not being honest when they pretend to have a part in creating the open source movement. In fact, they've done more than anyone except Apple to set it back - The only open part was publishing a subset of the API. Hell, Microsoft did not even document all the switches to DOS commands (fdisk
This point has evidently been missed because most of you are too young to remember. The large population of identical boxes isn't what makes open source possible; it's what makes closed source (proprietary binary-only software) possible. The root of open source and free software as it exists today is Unix (even though it was not open source), and in particular the notion of a portable operating system, together with the C language.
Back in the 80s, there was a huge diversity of machines running some flavor of Unix, with about a dozen different instruction sets and 50-odd distinct Unix-based or Unix-like operating systems in use. For most of these, there were simply too few machines to justify the sale of more than a few applications optimized to that particular machine. The result was that folks needed to learn how to program portably and needed to distribute source code. In many cases the license terms did not correspond to what we now call open source (one common licensing scheme was the single sentence "do whatever you want with this as long as you don't take my name off or try to make money with it"). And there were a number of "gated community" projects (you paid a company to get a source license, and you could compile it yourself).
Possibly the most significant program Larry Wall wrote in the old days was Configure -- he pretty much invented the concept of querying the system to obtain a portable set of #defines that would then allow the program to be built on many platforms. The original one asked the user too many questions that it could have figured out for itself, but is was chatty and witty and would insult your OS if Larry didn't like it. But in any case the point was that if a program didn't come with source, the users would not be able to use it in all probability, there were too many different machines. Proprietary apps that cost tens of thousands could be sold to those with mainframes or maybe Vaxes, but there was no possibility of a mass market. It was Usenet that drove the culture, though, especially the netnews software itself, which was the first example most folks saw of extremely portable C code. My first free software work was the contribution of a port of the 2.11B news software to an obscure Unix-on-top-of-VMS thingie called Eunice (Larry Wall's Configure had a specific insult if it figured out that you were running Eunice, something about a foul, musty stink).
Without this pre-existing free software culture in place, mass market machines like the Apple II and the IBM PC would not have produced it; there would have been no need. What would have happened in its absence, if machines got cheaper without converging on one architecture, would be that we'd all be using something like the BSD ports setup: a binary package would be useless, you'd have to download source and compile it locally, using "make world" to keep up to date. But it still could have worked.