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.
"
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.
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
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
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
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.
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 $65 was an enormous sum of money to me. The book contained the full schematics of the IBM and specifications on talking to its hardware.
In the back of the book was a full assembler listing of the IBM's boot ROM. (The ROM BASIC was sadly not provided.) I spent lots of time parsing through the code looking at how various devices were initialized and handled.
While Compaq may have used a lot of resources making a cleanroom version of the x86 boot ROM, the original was right there, for anyone with a few dollars to see. Microsoft hadn't the slightest thing to do with it.
He made the SW dominate the HW. You have to make HW that can run his SW or you are DOA. The rise of OSS was an unintended consequence, but there is a causal relationship.
Now that BG has this "little problem" with OSS, he has a solution: XBOX. If XBOX turns into a PC, it fragments the HW market which will allow BG to sell different versions of Windows for different architectures, providing a logical set of divisions for MSFT so that the next time the DOJ tries to break them up it can be done in a manner similar to the ATT breakup--very beneficial to shareholders who end up with shares in all the major industry players who must sell more product because competition leads to overlapping purchases. If XBOX does not become a PC, BG just sits on his existing market and/or reaps game and DVD profits. Either way, he wins. This guy is so smart he has you knocked out before you even know you are in the ring and that there is a boxing match. He's 50 moves ahead of your game. You are checkmated before the board is even set up. He makes the rules! The OSS people are foolish to think they have any chance of competing.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I read the original statement, and, frankly, it didn't sound to me like Gates was claiming credit for Open Source. What he said was that if it hadn't been for M$ 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
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. "
WTF are you talking about? There were *FAR* more publishers of software, magazines and far more books about computers being published than today. Hell, CBS wasn't alone in being one of many big media providers that was releasing software. The variety was astounding, especially compared to todays' larger volume.
$5000 for an Apple 2? Yes, and it came with 4K. I know - it replaced our S-100 frankenstein, and was well worth every penny (okay, my Dad bought it), and it came with several programming environments (some on ROM, some on disk), and *full* *fold* *out* *schematics*, plus a manual that listed every IO memory address and gave a tutorial on how to access them. It's probably the most open personal computer in history, and likely will remain so.
The only software is rudimentary databases and word processors.
Ruimentary, possibly because they ran in the aformentioned 4K (64K later in the game)? Yes. But there were entire GUIs that fit in that 64K, on a 100K diskette (or two) like Geos, or fantastic apps like Print Shop that were testiments to user friendliness that have yet to be beat. Loads of educational programs, starcharts... other than things that were impossible on that days hardware, everything was available that is today. And you would be very impressed by what *was* possible on that day's hardware.
Incidently, jumping back to the topic, quite a bit of it was open source as well - some of it was even published in magazines like Nybble, and typed in.
Games are less sophisticated than those on the Atari 2600. Monitors are monochrome.
First off, in those days, many computers used TVs as monitors, and thus were full color. Games, imho, were far far *more* sophisticated. It's *hard* to write a good game that is fun to play. It's easy to write one that looks impressive nowadays, but still equally hard to write one that plays well and is fun. And back then, clones were notable things - most games were very unique in certain ways. Nowadays, the differences between Alice, HalfLife and Halo are miniscule in general overview, but back then, most games really stood out from one another (or were semi exact clones by rival publishers).
Want Final Fantasy VII circa 80s? Use Ultima for the world map and fights, and Kings Quest for the side view sequences. Sure, the graphics are way better, but you're working with an incredible 33 Mhz and megs of memory for FFVII.
Apple is enforcing a closed source policy which improves the quality of the machines, but hampers development.
*Shrug* They are using closed source on BSD. Running any closed source app on Linux is the same, IMO: not a sin, unless you follow brother RMS. Not a great thing either, but I'm kicking HancomOffice's tires to see if I want to buy. But then, Apple has jumped around under many different management philosophies over the years, so I'd imagine there is a very schitzophrenic nature to their decision making process. My last Apple was a Mac LC, and I had long since switched to an Intel box as my primary computer. The titanium powerbook may tempt me in the future... my laptop's screen died, and I've vaguely been thinking when I get a bit more disposable income...
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
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
I don't know what parallel universe you were living in, but this isn't my memory of the early 1980's computing scene at all.
The Atari 2600, though popular, was sorely limited. Complex games simply weren't possible. Conversely, Apple-][ games were getting good graphics, and very deep game play. Brøderbund built its entire business on selling high-quality Apple-][ games that beat anything you could get for the Atari 2600.
Apple-][ systems only cost $1500, but that was for the base machine. Disk controllers, drives, and additional RAM were extra. Even though Commodore-64's were going for $300, Apple never lowered the price of the ][ line. You're also forgetting the other major players at the time: Atari with the 400, 800, and 1200 series systems; Commodore with the PET, VIC-20, and C-64; and Cromemco's line of S-100-based systems (popularized by the writings of Jerry Pournelle in BYTE Magazine). I'm probably forgetting a few others, but you get the idea.
Color monitors, though expensive, were quite common. Amdek was the big name in those days.
Apple's "closed policy" didn't really start until the release of the Macintosh in 1984. Prior to that, all the inner workings of the machine were published. I have on my bookshelf a copy of the Apple-][ System Manual, which comes complete with ROM monitor source code, and a fold-out schematic of the machine. Following Apple's lead, IBM likewise published the source to the ROM BIOS in the system manuals (tiny little three-ring binders). The only evidence of a "closed-source" policy at Apple prior to this was when they sued Franklin Computer for manufacturing an Apple-][ clone.
In many ways, the industry was more forthcoming with system and software information than it is now. Back in the 1980's, a request for hardware programming docs would be granted without a second thought. Now they look at you as if you're some kind of foaming-at-the-mouth lunatic.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
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
I worked for a shop that made most of its money selling CP/M boxes with customized software back in the early '80s, and what you say here is completely wrong. The industry was going great guns. There were dozens of players in every conceivable niche of the market, and some of them did very well for themselves indeed. Remember Altos? Eagle? Lotus? DBase II? Apple?
True, the market was a bit more fragmented than it is now. If you worked someplace that had a small system doing the bookkeeping, it probably ran CP/M or MP/M. When you went home, if you had a computer, it was probably an Apple, Commodore, TRS-80, or some such. There wasn't the crossover you see today. But so what?
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.
No. I remember clearly the introduction of the IBM PC. Sure, it had a 16-bit processor, but it also had an architecture that largely failed to take advantage of it, and there were huge libraries of existing products for 8-bit CP/M machines. The IBM PC took over the market for one reason alone: the nameplate. It was a trusim in those days that nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, and it overcame the reluctance of many organizations for adopting small computers.The OS? Obviously a CP/M ripoff of some kind, and completely irrelevant to the decision to buy.
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.
Nope. He was a key player in the contraction of the computer software industry, at least in terms of the number of major players. ("Major player" being defined as companies with a significant percentage of market share, not in terms of absolute size.) The dominance of MS in the software market will, I'm sure, be cited someday in economics textbooks as a classic case of market failure through the application of unfair and predatory business practises. Learn for yourself what happened to DR-DOS, just to mention one early competitor in the field of PC operating systems.
If we still had to use machine language and punch cards, there wouldn't be open source.
I programmed on a variety of boxes before MS came along, and I never once had to resort to either machine language or punch cards. And none of the users for any software I ever developed needed to be particularly sophisitcated, either. As it turned out, you didn't need to be a genius to use a menu-driven system.
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.
The "Open Source community" should do whatever it takes to keep BG honest.
And the brethren went away edified.
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?
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"
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.