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.
"
Why would Cringely try to find the truth behind Gates' statement? Couldn't he look for gold at the end of the rainbow or something? There's a better chance he'll find it.
Of course Bill Gates is the father of Open-Source. Apparently he used the same midwife that Al Gore did when he gave birth to the Internet.
Next thing you know Rosie O'Donnell is going to claim that she invented the chubby, annoying talk show host.
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 $500+ for a single piece of bloatware that has a total uptime of about 30 sec before it crashes, and when it does run, its still shaky with all the overly expensive Microsoft bloatware Office programs that run on it. THEREFORE a group of people rise to the occasion and flip the finger to "the man" and go off and create something that works, costs next to nothing (sorry, you still have to buy the hardware and the internet connection), without over commercialization. Thank you Gates for filling the market with crap. If you hadn't, then the best OS wouldn't be where it is today, and we would only learn how to program from college courses, not hacking code and seeing how stuff works. Thank god for the FSF
I read the original statement, and, frankly, it didn't sound to me like Gates was claiming credit for Open Source. What he said was that if it hadn't been for M$ 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.
Anyone who remembers computing in the early '80's should recognize that the industry wasn't going anywhere. $5000 for an Apple 2? The only software is rudimentary databases and word processors. Games are less sophisticated than those on the Atari 2600. Monitors are monochrome. Apple is enforcing a closed source policy which improves the quality of the machines, but hampers development.
It was the pairing of M$'s DOS with IBM PCs, and an open policy towards clones, that allowed the explosion of PCs seen in the mid-80's. Without that expansion, we'd probably still be looking at a computer in every 100th home, and no gaming or online community to speak of besides Nethack, university email accounts, and usenet.
While Gates is hardly responsible for coming up with the idea of Open Source, he was certainly a key person in the expansion of the computer industry. 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.
Gates' comments were perhaps worded less specifically than they should have been, but the Open Source community is likely also guilty of jumping on the comment more than necessary.
At the very least, it's worth considering.
"Omnia quia sunt, umbra sunt."
It's a real shame that Bowie Poag took down the old "Story of Propaganda" when he moved his site around - that story fit this article perfectly. It asserted that Microsoft and Bill Gates were simply pawns in Jack Kennedy's plan to bring about the Free Software movement.
Come on Bowie, put Propaganda back up. If you don't have it anymore, may I have permission to put my local mirror online?
www.eFax.com are spammers
In a related story, Satan Prince of Lies and All That is Unholy, is the father of Christianity.
Adolf Hitler is the father of lasting peace in the western hemisphere.
Ellen Degeneres is the father of Ann Heche's baby.
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.
Mac OS X isn't open source, but Darwin, the OpenBSD-based foundation of X is. This still means that Apple donates all of its low-level code back to the OSS community (Darwin has one of the best FireWire implementations around, just to cite one example), and is, IMO, a great example of how a commercial company and the OSS community can coexist.
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
And the russian Czars were completely responsible for the Bolshevik Revolution. Funny though--Microsoft acts all non chalant about it but in a few years they're going to be really sorry about their open source illegitimate love child. Then again, I doubt those french speaking Russian Imperialist jerks were too fond of the Bolsheviks. Oh wait, nevermind...they were dead! Har.
"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
...just not in the way he thinks he is. The entire Free Software/Open Source movement mainly began as a reaction to propertarian modes of software production, of which Microsoft eventually became the greatest, most extreme, and most infamous example. Even Richard Stallman says the GNU Project began as such a reaction in his history of the GNU Project.
All this shuck about open and extensible architectures was none of Microsoft's doing, and the Free Software movement would likely have existed even without it, though it probably would not have grown as rapidly.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
After all, as time goes on, the people who know where the bodies are buried will start to disappear. And what will be left will be the Microsoft Press version of The History of the Open Source Movement By Bill Gates II (the grandson or something), without a single mention of Linus.
or maybe it will just be the MS History of the World
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I've read some of your posts and I find them hilarious, but I'm a little confused why you choose the relatively innocent geeks of slashdot to berate.
I would think that causing mayhem in person would be much more stimulating. Splashing mud on pre-schoolers, molesting nuns, exposing yourself to house pets, running down the elderly, that sort of thing.
I mean only that the IBM platform is special because of what happened with it, not that it was so because it was any great innovation.
Pirates of Silicon Valley I think pretty accurately illustrates Microsoft's intent in the portability stipulation in its contract with IBM, despite any of the movie's other shortcomings.
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
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.
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...
Is it just me or were computers more fun before, Bill(sarcism) OpenSourced the BIOS!
I hate to get off on a rant here but...
I mean I miss going into the Software, Etc. and asking for Ultima 4 and being asked, for C64, Apple, IBM, Atari or Amiga? I miss Compute! and all the other great magazines that went with the times! I loved seeing the new and interesting hardware that came out everyday for these systems. I love the small hack! 64K not 64MB (and 64MB isa video card now!) Hell, there are no good programers today that can compare with the hacks of earlier days. Linux and Windows are both blotware when compaired with the AmigaOS! I have a Commodore 128D on my desk next to my Mac and PC and let me tell you the games on it are still better then the newest stuff. I don't know but, PC's today lack soul.
But thats just my opinion. I could be wrong! (GRIN!)
Well, nearly open.
Somewhere back in my parents' house is an original IBM PC Technical Reference manual. I bought it for $65 back when I was in junior high school and $65 was an enormous sum of money to me. The book contained the full schematics of the IBM and specifications on talking to its hardware.
In the back of the book was a full assembler listing of the IBM's boot ROM. (The ROM BASIC was sadly not provided.) I spent lots of time parsing through the code looking at how various devices were initialized and handled.
While Compaq may have used a lot of resources making a cleanroom version of the x86 boot ROM, the original was right there, for anyone with a few dollars to see. Microsoft hadn't the slightest thing to do with it.
That's not the best example you could have given, though. Your comment is similar to saying that id software has one of the best implementations of Quake III ;-)
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
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"?
To quote Shania Twain (I think that's her name) -- "That don't impress me much!". Couldn't they give us free hardware instead of a couple lines of improvement in the Darwin preemptive multitasking modules? ;-)
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
Are you certain that it wouldn't be:
:: open source software
:: Internet
:: RDBMS
Bill Gates
Al Gore
Larry Ellison
-jerdenn
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
True, but I thought it was relevant since people were complaining about how bad the FireWire support in Linux distros was after the iPod came out. It is also noteworthy that Darwin is not Apple's only open source software, they have QuickTime streaming server for instance, and OpenPlay would do wonders for cross-platform gaming if anyone would implement it ;)
"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.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
IBM wanted the PC to support multiple operating systems. Within a year of release, IBM was shipping PC/DOS, UCSD/P-System, and CPM/86. Soon thereafter, we saw XENIX, QUNIX, Concurrent C/CPM86, and a slew of other operating systems. If Bill Gates had the idea that he "helped" create Open Source, as we know it today, he did so because he still had to compete during that time period. A lesson he should try to remember, today.
;-) Mr. Gates probably faced this problem earlier on his career, while his basic interpreter was "pirated" to machines that his company did not ship binaries for. Probably faced it again, as an executable written for on a TI PC would not run on a COMPAQ PC, both running MS/DOS.
As for the "real" father(s) of Open Source, as we know it today, I would nominate Ward Christensen and Randy Seuss. Both of them created the world's first BBS, CBBS. Ward also created the X-modem file transfer protocol, and Randy later created one of the first public USENET nodes in the country. BBS's provided the framework under which tranfers of files first became onto the radar screen of the public eye. Earlier programs were distributed in source form, not for openness per se, but because it difficult, if not impossible to produce a binary that would run on most machines. You had to be open. The "virus" was born. Well, probably earlier, but that was before my time.
Mr. Gates, IMHO, no human being has done more to impede and retard the advancement of computing technology than yourself. Think for a moment how much M$ spends every year on R&D. Look what you have to show for it. Look at the production of NEW ideas in the 60's through the 80's. Then look at the 90's. The reason Open Source thrives is to spite you. Even though you have succeeded in driving every worthy commercial competitor into the ground, we will not stand for it. We demand that our machines ability to do work for us follow the Moore curve, and not the curve of your burgeoning empire. We demand choice. We demand the ability to make up our own minds. We will innovate. As much as you try, we will see our own vision, and not the one you attempt to impose.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
FreeBSD. Not OpenBSD.
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.
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
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.
Actually you're wrong. The issues that caused the rise of Free Software have nothing to do with having to recompile your application for different architectures and everything to do users being free to fix bugs in software they have been sold.
Here's a history lesson or two
And, yes, as you can guess from the name of it, it's Open Source.
And this choice was made by the market, not by some monopoly.
In the end, you see a high level of standardisation going on, whether or not this is driven by regulation or a monopoly. Even refills for Parker pens are now a standard product that fits a range of pens.
M$ may have hastened the adoption of a standard, and that may have become entrenched, but in the long run, their incessant desire to keep fiddling with it may be their undoing. OS/2 and Linux do quite nicely because their APIs are very stable and established. [Shell scripts in OS/2 2.0 still run under the latest version, 10 years later.]
What may also force the issue is the tieing of multiple parts together. One can not use POP3 to clients other than OutLook, yet this has many serious bugs. This, and the restraint of trade it imposes, may do MS more damage.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
Anybody who buys Bill's rediculous assertion that he created Open Source needs a severe beating with a clue stick.
History lesson: Bill's first reaction to an "Open Source" effort was the following (infamous) letter:
An Open Letter to Hobbyists
To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted. Will quality software be written for the hobby market
Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.
The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.
Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.
What about the guys who re-sell Altair BASIC, aren't they making money on hobby software? Yes, but those who have been reported to us may lose in the end. They are the ones who give hobbyists a bad name, and should be kicked out of any club meeting they show up at.
I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up, or has a suggestion or comment. Just write to me at 1180 Alvarado SE, #114, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software.
Bill Gates
General Partner, Micro-Soft
What a ringing endorsement of the principals of Open Source.
Why am I not suprised that Cringley is ignorant of this letter?
So, not only is Bill Gates a philanthropist, he's the greatest philanthropist ever. Microsoft's business practices notwithstanding, accusing him of avarice is misguided.
Microsoft didn't bitch much about said pirating. It was pretty well impossible to buy a PC without a license of DOS anyway. Some things never change. They didn't really get serious about piracy until they'd established complete and utter market domination.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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.
Close, but no cigar: If you can't beat them, buy them, then beat them to death, then bury them.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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
Maybe Bill will claim he is the creator of idea idea of a pie-in-the-face. It would make sense since open source is pretty much doing the same thing to his empire.
Men believe what they want. - Caesar
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.
The first company to do a lawywer-proof "clean room" re-implementation of IBM's BIOS was Compaq. Other cloners were less scrupulous, many copying the IBM roms outright, sometimes leaving in the copyright tags. Phoenix technologies, makers of the well known Phoenix BIOS, was another early player in the BIOS arena.
I mention this as historical background to the main point of this post, which is that neither Microsoft nor Bill Gates ever created or sold a clone or IBMs BIOS for the PC. In fact they would have little reason to do so seeing as how they helped create the original BIOS itself. Remember the version of basic that would pop up when you didn't have a boot disk on the original IBM systems? Guess who wrote that? Yep, thats right Microsoft. Microsoft also had input into the design and feature set of the EGA graphics card. I can't say for certain what else they influenced or helped design on the hardware side of things, but I can tell you that they never created a CLONE of the PC's BIOS, at least not any that ever made it out to the public, what they did in house for a lark I can't say.
I almost expect ignorant journalists to make statements like "Microsoft created the first open BIOS for the PC." But if Gates himself is saying that then someone needs to give him history lesson.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Evidently Gates has forgotten everything before 1981. To summarize the state of computing on college campuses in 1973-75 (approximately the period when Gates & friends were using free time on Harvard mainframes to develop Altair BASIC, which was Microsoft's first product):
Proprietary operating systems -- in most cases the source was available, but since it only worked on one machine...
Commercial applications usually distributed as source and compiled for the target environment.
Lots of college kids busy hacking and swapping code. This was always source code -- since the hardware wasn't standardized, you had to re-compile for it, often with some tweaks. And the _fun_ was in the tweaks. (I kind of overdid it, spending so much time playing with the Star Trek program that I stopped going to classes. Eventually the college kicked me out...)
Who thought about copyright when we were having so much fun? Gates...
Of course, to play in this arena you had to somehow get access to a computer that cost more than a yard full of new Cadillacs. Either you had to be a student at a college that did not limit access to the computers, or you had to have a very tolerant employer. Microcomputers opened this up to everyone who was sufficiently interested. Within a few months of the release of Altair BASIC, hobbyist magazines were publishing hundreds of programs for it. Amd soon there were other microcomputers on the market, and everyone was adapting BASIC programs to them, and these were also swapped freely. Actually, from 1975-1981, Microsoft _was_ a major driver behind open source -- but nobody had invented a name for it yet, and this is certainly NOT what Gates was trying to claim credit for.
Just one thing Gates is correct about in the PC era -- if it hadn't been for his creation of gigantic monolithic software packages, all bound up in copyrights and security thru obscurity, it's quite possible that all those merry hackers would have simply continued doing their own thing without ever seeing themselves as a "movement" named Open Source, or a need to write the GPL so Gates and his imitators could not absorb code that had been given away freely into proprietary, closed, and undocumented programs...
The year was 1975, Bill Gates and co. begain porting BASIC (where did they get the source?) to the Altair, but it was taking them longer then they had planned.
Many had long already paid for it, as they had for hardware they had yet to receive or had gotten but didn't work.
Well the hombrew computer club.....
There was a show at some hotel, where the Altair was running Bill's port of BASIC, but many wondered why they didn't yet have it as they had already paid for it.
Sooooo, someone took a copy of the paper tape and made some copies. Took these copies to the club meeting and gave them out with one requirement. That the
receiving parties also make copies and bring them to the next club meeting and share.
Bill didn't want to release his BASIC yet because he claimed it still had some bugs in it. But by the time he did release it, the buggy paper tape version had
already spread across the country. But not only had it spread, but people were debugging it, learning how it worked and fixing it themselves and even selling
their bosses and companies they worked for on buying it. Certainly knowing how it worked was a big plus.
Well Bill got mad that he finally released version of BASIC wasn't selling very well and coined the term "Piracy".
The matter even made it to the front cover of TIME Magizine as "The Great Software Flap"
So yeah, Bill Started OSS, But sure as hell, not because he wanted to.
All this can be found in an early book by Steven Levy like "hacker: heros of the computer revolution"
That particular moment was part of the book "Life, the Universe, and Everything".
Not a typewriter
Sad to say, I can't take credit for unconscious brilliance. Of course, that hasn't stopped people before.
Actually, it could be Bill the III, v 2.0 (the clone) - but I digress. Odds are half decent that somebody will want to clone Gates, regardless of the consequences.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
-dB
"It if was easy to do, we'd find someone cheaper than you to do it."
...more self-absorbedly disconnected from computing reality...
...than Robert Cringely...
...evaluating Bill Gates' historical revisionism...
--Blair
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.
Actually, you are confusing the free software movement with Open Source. There is a difference. Stallman start the free software movement, but Open Source has it's roots in the creation of Unix itself (this is the reason there is BSD style Unix and System V style Unix). The original source code to Unix was made availble to the public, and evently Berkley got their hands on it and changed it to fit there needs, itches, and likings. It is from this communities trading of source code that open source sprang.
This by the way predate Bill Gate's involvement by about three years, and you could go back prior to Unix & the C language.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
Here was a PERFECT opportunity to use an open source model, and instead Bill sent everybody bigfoot letters.
Perhaps you are too young to grasp the hobbiest climate at the time. There were a few dozen hackers (tops) playing with the Altair when it was released. Why? It was expensive, bulky, and basically useless. The only people playing with this device were freaks and geeks who enjoyed the challenge of a new (useless gadget). We are NOT talking about a consumer device needing software for the masses.
BillG did NOT stand to lose ANY money from people "stealing" his prized code (and there is evidence that it wasn't even Bill's code... Paul Allen allegedly did most of the work.. it was up to Bill to take care of the "business" side). We are talking a miniscule market here - say, 20 people, optimistically.
The Altair in general would have benefitted greatly from a COOPERATIVE effort, something that BillG was (and still is) incapable of comprehending. In his twisted, narcissistic, self-absorbed mind, all he can see are profit margins. This single letter completely decimated the Altair as a platform, and most hobbiests threw up their hands in utter disgust of BillG's sickening strong arm tactics.