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.
"
Open Source might not have started if that greedy fool hadn't published crap, charged an arm and a leg for the software, establish a monopoly, place gags on hardware manufacturers and software developers making sure stuff will ONLY run on Windows, and slowly reach total vertical and horizontal integration through ruthless tactics of toying around with the companies so that they can buy them cheap (sorta like a cat playing around w/ it's prey just to be cruel). If Gates wasn't so anal-retentive about licenses, about losing $50 here and there and if he didn't choke the market to fill the world with his bloatware, then Open Source wouldn't be where it is at right now, if even invented. It sorta goes like this- resistance groups don't form when everybody is happy, and when crap isn't thrown at you. In this case, we pay $500+ for a single piece of bloatware that has a total uptime of about 30 sec before it crashes, and when it does run, its still shaky with all the overly expensive Microsoft bloatware Office programs that run on it. THEREFORE a group of people rise to the occasion and flip the finger to "the man" and go off and create something that works, costs next to nothing (sorry, you still have to buy the hardware and the internet connection), without over commercialization. Thank you Gates for filling the market with crap. If you hadn't, then the best OS wouldn't be where it is today, and we would only learn how to program from college courses, not hacking code and seeing how stuff works. Thank god for the FSF
OpenSource would exist with or without Gates, DOS didn't do anything for programming, however if it was anything it was the fact that it had limitations combined with the hardware at the time that spawned OpenSource if you are to use that argument. The only thing that I think Gates did was to bring computers to the masses. OpenSource would of existed with or without him though. Microsoft and Gates didn't spawn anything new, they still don't and they probably never will. That's not their jobs, that's not what they do. They bring existing technologies that might be too expensive to the masses at an affordable price, that's all Microsoft has ever done. They do it well.
"At this level, Bill Gates can certainly claim to have "influenced" the open architecture strategy."
This statement coming from Jack Sams, who is certainly one to be taken seriously. Seeing that he was Gates's point of contact through IBM at this time, he ought to know. It seems that our friend Mr. Gates didn't violate any agreements with IBM either. Sams says "The chip is indeed copyrighted and could be infringed." He then goes on to say "This (DOS +BIOS) open architecture has been public domain since it first shipped...." Guess Bill is covered here.
Despite these statements, it is quite a claim to say he had more than a minor role in the early open source movement. This is all coming from the same company who called open source a "cancer" and from the same person who called it "communism." I, for one, would not be proud to have created communism.
Additionally, Sams points out that "the 'open architecture' strategy was entirely deliberate on IBM's part." This reduces Gates's minor role still further since IBM seems to have meant for it to happen.
IMO most of Gates's statements are too vague to be
dissected any further. Some of Sams's material is also hard to sort out; I can only say I wish I had been there.
"I either want less corruption, or more chance
to participate in it." -- Ashleigh Brilliant
Open source doesn't require that everything be standard as in the same, it only requires that everything be open; look at how many platforms open source OSes run on.
$5000 for an Apple 2? ... Apple is enforcing a closed source policy which improves the quality of the machines, but hampers development.
The Apple II was an open machine. Sorry if you didn't like the software, it was the first mass-adopted personal computer, and did give rise to some of the killer apps that put the computer in offices and homes, and had the first games written in BASIC.
It was that expansion which resulted in so many educated, trained, computer users that people started being able to program their own systems. If we still had to use machine language and punch cards, there wouldn't be open source.
Woz was the person that most directly created the human-usable computer; Gates did some work in it but all the original Apple IIs used Woz's code, including his completely original implementation of BASIC.
Now I must say that I agree with the more balanced viewpoint the article puts out, you are just trying to spin it to make it look like Gates invented things he didn't. I'm afraid it is all to common now for everyone to assume that Gates must have invented the computer and everything on it.
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
Wasn't Gates's Basic compiler unwillingly open-sourced when a copy of the code was stolen?
I think I remember reading that in one of Steven Levy's books.
I think we are all tired of hearing this. How many times must we set the story straight:
"Apple worked with Xerox openly to bring their developments to a mass audience. That's what Steve portrayed Apple as being good at."
"Steve Jobs made the case to Xerox PARC execs directly that they had great technology but that Apple knew how to make it affordable enough to change the world. This was very open. In the end, Xerox got a large block of Apple stock for sharing the technology. That's not stealing outright.
Apple didn't get any stock from Microsoft. Nor was Apple dealt with openly in this area by Microsoft."
There is a big difference between something not being your idea and stealing it; this was perhaps the most glaring example of Microsoft ethics. You also have to look at which of those three companies implemented it best.
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
Both are rather selective interpretations of statements that nobody actually bothered to read.
r e. and.the.Inte1.html
http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/2000/RRE.Al.Go
Don't get me wrong, though... Bill Gates is still the devil...
I used one of the last papertape machines in the mid-seventies; we had rolls of free software all over the place, fortran code people wanted everyone to share. Having one's name in the comments made you feel like a real bigshot.
S-100 and MITS Altair had the first busses that really caught on, and Apple's, of course. I worked on a number of S-100s in the late seventies; upgrading cards that were mostly interchangable from a variety of vendors...compupro, CCS, Cromemco, etc.
If anything, it was Gary Kildall and Digital Research -- with their extremely hackable BIOS -- that made all the difference.
The man has a lot of nerve claiming he had anything to do with the roots of computing, other than teaching people it's okay to lie, cheat and steal.
Computing was above that until Microsoft came on the scene.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
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I think you're missing one thing: he can't attack open source software as a whole. As long a people want to develop freely available software, they will, and there is absolutely nothing he can do to stop this. He finally has an ennemy he can't stop.
They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
The question he was asked was whether the open source model was a more efficient one if the goal is to "build an ecosystem of developers (developers! developers!), users, resellers...).
He did not answer that question, but instead went off on a rant about how he had something to do with an open architecture on a hardware system he had only tangental influence over 20 years ago.
Vote Quimby.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
I wonder how the DMCA would have affected the creation of PC clones back in the `80's? Could IBM have sued Compaq, or does a "cleanroom" version squeak past that? How about you copy the ROM BIOS verbatim, but you encrypt it. You then counter sue under DMCA for circumventing the encryption! :)
It's mandatory to wash your hands before returning to the land of Dairy Queen.
Let me see if I get this right. Somebody asked Bill:
"It appears to me that the open source movement is gaining momentum, and as I understand it, the key to success of a softwareproduct involves efficiently building an ecosystem of developers and users,resellers, and so forth. Isn't the open source model a more efficient paradigm forbuilding such a community around your products, and isn't perhaps Microsoft maybe on the wrong side of that trend of long-term?"
To which Bill answered:
"Let me start out, really the reason that you see open source there at all is because we came in and said there should be a platform that's identical with millions and millions of machines, and the BIOS of that should be open to everybody to use, and all the extensibility should be there. And so it was very predictable that once we had gotten the PC going, and going and gotten hundreds of millions of machines out there, that it had always been sort of free software and the universities would flourish and there would be more of that... Blah, Blah, Blah"
Fistly Billys answer sounds like something from the mouth of Dan Quale or Ronald Regan (in his altsheimer phase). Secondly It also seems to me that confused as his staement is that Bill is not claiming to be the originator/father of the Open Sourcre movement. He did not say "I came in" He said "we came in" so depending on what he meand by we that statement may include IBM. At best he is claiming to have helped create the "ecosystem" refered to in the question. This statement has been ripped out of context and nobody seems to have bothered to post Bills entire answer. Is there a transcript of the debate somewhere. I'd like to see the place where he says "It is a little known fact that Microsoft actually invented the open source movement y'know" and not some badly formulated comment that can be read a dozen different ways depending on how much you hate Bill Gates.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Sorry, Bill, but that doesn't hold up. Anyone else here remember the DEC Rainbow? The Rainbow was an MS-DOS machine but it wasn't PC-compatible. There were a few machines like this in the early '80s, but they were displaced when the true clones appeared. It seems to me that the early vision for MS-DOS was for it to become the Unix of the microcomputer world: a common API that ran on a number of different architectures where porting applications was (theoretically, anyway) a recompile away. The fact that MS fought IBM for the right to sell DOS to OEMs bears this out.
But the IBM PC succeeded, not because of Microsoft, but because it had IBM written on it and that made the suits all tingly inside.
One could also point to those early MS products like Multiplan (the forerunner of Excel) that were written in some sort of pseudocode so they could be easily ported to different micros. I'm sure Bill would claim that these were compromises in the Great Vision (computer on every desk yadda yadda) and that what he wanted all along was for the PC to succeed. But MS didn't care what machine succeeded, so long as there was MS software running on it and their early strategy of backing every horse in the running demonstrates this.
So, what you're saying is that if I assasinate Bill Gates right now, I'll be doing the world's poor the greatest favor in history?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.