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. "

Comments

Re:Gates' Comment

[90XDoubleSide]

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.

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.

Re:I knew it would happen

[90XDoubleSide]

The GUI thing was originally stolen from Xerox.

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.