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

[Christian Smith]

On Fri, 9 Nov 2001, ae wrote:

>Don't know if anyone has read this yet but it's amusing to say the least.
>What worries me is that he may even genuinly believe the rubbish he comes
>out with.
>
>>From SeattleTimes: "Gates said there's a role for free software alongside
>commercial software, but the open-source movement taken to its extreme would
>mean no software jobs or taxes paid by software companies, and it would mean
>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."

Of course, he's absolutely right. Had MSDOS not been so piss poor at
hiding platform dependancies, PC hardware would have have advanced far
past where it is now and not created the antiquated platform the PC is
now.

Whether thats a good thing is debatable.

1981->Now - Likes of Sun and HP etc. have gone from 68k, VME based
machines to the modern RISC based platforms now prevelent in the UNIX
workstation market. Sun have used three distinct processor architectures!

1981->Now - PCs are stuck with a 32-bit equivalent of the 8080, which
itself was compatible with a processor that was started before 4040 was
even conceived! It's why the i860 was a failure. It's why the Itanium will
be a failure.

Had PCs had the flexibility to adapt to changing technology, we'd all be
running RISC based workstations, with SCSI IO and at half the cost of
existing hardware. And if ANY of the RISC vendors had the research budgets
that Intel and AMD have had to play with, the likes of Pentium 4 and
Athlon wouldn't get a look in on performance.

MS have much to answer for...

>
>http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/134363780_microsoft
>08.html
>
>Anthony.
>

Christian

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