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 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
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
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.
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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?
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