[Gllug] Gates, self proclaimed father of open-source

[Nix]

On Fri, 9 Nov 2001, SteveC gibbered:
> * ae (ae at anthonye.plus.com) wrote:
>> companies such as Microsoft would not risk investing in advanced products.
>> Gates also took some credit for the genesis of open-source software. He said
>> Microsoft made it possible by standardizing computers: "Really, the reason
>> 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," he
>> said."
> 
> Now this bit has an acorn of truth.

A very small acorn.

>                                      I wasn't there in the early 80's like
> most people on this list :-)

Hey, I've only been a Linux person since '97; I'd never heard of free
software at all before about '94.

>                              but from what I have read Microsofts attempts 
> to go beyond IBM hardware when Compaq came up and then on with other 
> manufacturers was crucial to having an open market in hardware, bringing 
> standard in and costs down etc.

So that might have increased the pool of available hackers, but it
didn't create it in the least. The FSF started on Suns and VAXen, IIRC
(certainly the m68k is one of GCC's oldest architectures, and oddities
in GCC's design show its m68k heritage; GCC was one of the first GNU
programs, after Emacs, of course).

> Now it may have been inevitible that another company *could* have done 
> this, but they didn't. Lets look at the closest second - the mac. Not 
> exactly open was it?

The Mac was basically irrelevant to the free software community until
very recently --- unlike the NeXT.

> OPenSource may have started in the dungeons of MIT on PDP-11's or 
> whatever,

Depends what you define it as. The term started at a chinwag in Feb 98,
IIRC :) software sharing had no fixed starting date, it was always
done. Emacs started in '76 and the GPL was formulated in ~84--85, I
think. (Before my time so I may be wrong.)

>           but to get a truely collaborative effort you need a few billion 
> pieces of compatible machinery and then a tiny fraction of the owners to 

Really? Hardly. Expensive time-shared boxes in universities did well
enough; indeed, much of the FSF's stuff originally came from such
places.

>                      This wouldn't have happened without the standards 
> that MS used to fight tooth and nail for

Regrettably wrong :( I don't know if they fought or not, but the
mass-available PC was, while useful, not a necessary condition for free
software.

-- 
`You're the only person I know who can't tell the difference
 between a pair of trousers and a desk.' --- Kieran, to me

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