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The Tech Interviews of Yesteryear
nihilist_1137 writes: "Cnet has a collection of interviews with some of the 'biggest movers and shakers' of 2001. It focuses on their plans, ambitions and fears. Included is Sir Arthur C. Clark, Bill Gates, Will Wright, and Bill Joy, to name a few." It''s a fairly eclectic bunch of interviews collected from the last year, not ones done specifically for 2001 nostalgia.
About the GPL, he said "But if you say to people, "Do you understand the GPL?" And they'll say, "Huh?" And they're pretty stunned when the Pac-Man-like nature of it is described to them."
Pac-Man-like nature? IANAL but I think I understand the basics of the GPL but wtf is the Pac-Man-like nature of it?
Anyone care to comment?
They said "give", didn't they?
and have you sign equally daunting NDAs before you actually get to see the code.
So? It would still be fascinating. I'm not doing this just out of open-source altruism, you know: it's just always been a dream of mine to see the code for a part of Office.
Plus... I want to see if I'll get a reply. :D
For anyone interested, here's the email I just sent them:
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Salutations;
I am a user of Microsoft products, Windows and Office among others. I follow various pieces of Microsoft press with interest and intrigue, and I recently read Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates' interview with C|Net.
Referencing the section of Mr. Gates' comments referring to open source software:
"I don't know that anyone has ever asked for the source code for Word. If they did, we would give it to them."
Taking Mr. Gates' comment at face value, I hereby request a copy of the source code for Word. I would be fascinated to learn from such a program. It has long been an ambition of mine to see exactly what goes into the Office suite's programs.
I am completely serious in this query, and would appreciate a reply in the same vein.
Thank you,
(My real name, which I decline to place on Slashdot thank-you-very-much. ;))
---
They said on the page that they would have someone get back to me within twenty-four hours using the email address I provided. Anyone interested in the reply can email me and request it.
Pain(n): when you're telnetting into a box doing somethin cool, and some luser calls for help with a 'critical error' ad
Dale Fuller: The new barbarians? is an interesting article about borland's resurgence as a real company in the marketplace, from thier slump for the past several years. The article doesn't really come out and say it, but the reason borland is doing well now, and wasn't before, is the personnel. I find it amusing that they don't just come out and say it, but they refer, again and again to the "departures of key staffers" when they started their decline, and now, according to Fuller, "one of the major indicators is the number of cool programmers who want to work here--and we're now getting people back from Microsoft, from universities, from all over the world." I guess what Robert A. Heinlein said is true: "brainpower is the scarcest commodity and the only one of real value."
I'm a concientious
They said on the page that they would have someone get back to me within twenty-four hours using the email address I provided. Anyone interested in the reply can email me and request it.
I've just got to see that reply. I'm sure they'll refuse, but I can't decide if they'll offer to sell it for a trillion dollars, or if they'll just say you took the quote out of context. In any event, I'd love to see the return email.
"There is this whole history that free software is developed often in the academic environment, where basically government money funded that work. And then commercial work is done. TCP/IP came out of the university environment. Now, 90 percent of the implementations you buy are commercially tuned and supported. And then the companies that do that commercial work pay taxes, create jobs, so the government keeps funding more research, primarily in universities. So that ecosystem where you have free software and commercial software, and customers always get to decide which they use, that's a very important and healthy ecosystem."
First of all, in many college based 'free' software it is the programmer or group of programmer who 'pays' for the development, in the manner of paying for thier education and sacraficing time they could have spent at a job, studying or with friends. In rare cases there are Government grants for that lobbyists have pushed through congress, because politicians are cheaper than developing the software yourself.
This is why GPL is a 'Threat.' It is a threat to government funding to get the best and brightest upcoming programmers to implement the newest developments in software. Under a "free" license the software company with the money to push these bills through congress will also be able to snap up patents and copyrights which the can then 'license' to third party developers.
Free software development is not a 'healthy' ecosystem. Many time the people who put the most effort into 'free' software have turned around to find themselves being sued out of exsitance for violating patents or copyrights on code they wrote. Worse still is the independant software developer, should they wish to write a routine they first have to check who has patents on that. Even if they wish to write from scratch they may have to pay as much as $25 per piece of software they 'ship' depending on what it is they're trying to do. This obviously benenfits the major players, those who have the money to get patents or copyrights on 'obvious' code. This is why as soon as a freeware or shareware app becomes good it's author finds themselves in deep legal waters. Once a program is 'good enough' it is a threat to anyone with a similar, more costly program. If that company has a legal staff they can sue, or better yet Cease-and-desist letter out of existance anyone who poses a threat.
Myself I don't mind that a company like say apple is capable of using BSD code to write a stable Operating system, as long as apple is crediting the authors and isn't turning around suing BSD developers. While not a scientific statistic according to google.com about 2,180 pages have the phrase "Microsoft Sues" on them. I didn't have any luck finding how many companies microsoft sued last year but I seem to recall it was twice as many as sued Microsoft. Also is you take away piracy the hit result is still over 1500. Some other interesting addendums is that adding the word 'patent' outsite the quotes narrows it to some 200 hits, and adding 'copyright' only narrows it to 1500 pages. In the interest of fairness "apple sues" matches 1500 hits and "linux sues" matches 7. However apparently "Linus sues" can't be found anywhere on the internet (until google indexes this page anyways.)
If I had to sum up the software development market in one catch phrase "Innovation through Litigation" is the one that comes to mind, although "If you can't code it, Sue for it." comes in a close second.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Remember a while ago when Cringely wrote the article about Microsoft building their own version of TCP/IP?
I really thought that Cringely had misheard some information at that point. I couldn't see how or why Microsoft would want to do that.
Then I read the interview with Bill Gates that was part of C|Net's end-of-year wrap-up. Check out this quote:
[C|Net] As described by Microsoft, HailStorm has to be hosted on servers globally for the system to work. How do you plan to do that and ensure security?
[Gates] "We are doing a lot. All of those things are being done with other people. The very protocols of the Internet will evolve for security and quality of service and richer caching. And so we are out talking with the Ciscos and the Akamais and Intel--you name it--for that level of stuff." [italics mine]
All I can say is: wow.
How much do you want to bet that Microsoft will be calling this "Secure TCP/IP"?
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