Very Computer

<http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/134363780_mi...>

"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," [Gates] said.

However, in a very, very odd way he is right that he did contribute to opensource. If
msdos had been posix compatible and "unix like" then Linus may have carried on playing
"Prince of Persia" instead of making Linux. He has also alienated so many people that
crazy people like drsquare can even manage to say a few good things about Linux. Yes,
things are bad for poor old Bill.

<http://www.veryComputer.com/;

Quote:

> "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," [Gates] said.

--
TuxTrax   (n.) An invincible, all terrain, Linux driven armored *
vehicle that can take as much fire as it gives ;-)

(definition courtesy mjcr)

My politically unimportant, socially insignificant, work-in-progress
web site is at www.tuxtrax.com

--
I run Linux, no *y RedHat, Debian, Slackware, or Corel, just Linux.
Linux accepted my new hardware without any effort on my part.
Windows took one look at my new hardware and committed suicide.

I could be deluded, but I was always under the impression --- setting
aside RS's (and others in open source) philosophies for the moment ---
that one of the pragmatic selling points of open source was its appeal
to _cross-platform_ developers.  I.e., if you're extemely lucky, a
recompile "works first time"; if not, you muck about with headers and
other platform-specific chunks of code; worst-case, it's badly designed
source, and you roll up your sleeves so to speak, but at the end of
the day(/week/epoch) you've managed to port it to a platform it wasn't
necessarily designed for.

In that sense the opposite of Gates's "claim" should be the case: a
rich diversity of hardware platforms should provide a _better_
environment for open-source projects to thrive.  This counterclaim
seems bourne out by anectodal evidence (e.g. in READMEs and such) that
"we found these bugs while porting from X to Y platforms".  Perl is
touted as a "glue language", enabling (among other things) diverse
systems to talk to one another; Linux's ability to run on diverse
hardware is considered a positive thing; blah blah blah, I'm sure
many other examples could be found without much effort.

Perhaps in a universe with only one hardware platform Gates's "claim"
could be investigated.  It strikes me as yet another lame bit of that
subliminal advertising so popular in those quarters: to simultaneously
claim credit for the entire open source movement (I thought we were
supposed to consider it a cancer? Oh well), as well as claim that only
one hardware platform exists (and this thanks to... them again!).

Perhaps Zippy _did_ say it best: zowie.

Darrin

Quote:>> "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," [Gates] said.

> First of all, Microsoft had nothing to do with open source in
> these terms.  In fact, the earliest Open Source foundries
> (AT&T Version 6, BSD, and  GNU) originated in the
> UNIX environment, where people needed source BECAUSE THE
> HARDWARE WAS DIFFERENT.

Quote:> In a funny way, Gates did have a role.  He was so hated,
> loathed, despised, and  unliked by the UNIX community,
> who hated shrink-wrapped licenses, vaporware,
> copy protection schemes that relied on CPU Clock speed, ability
> to write bad sectors to hard drives, and punitive
> measures ranging from  refusing to run the program at all,
> to reformatting the hard drive and writing it with
> random garbage, that it generated a demand for Open Source.

--
Hack a Linux kernel today!

--
T. Max Devlin
  *** The best way to convince another is
          to state your case moderately and
             accurately.   - Benjamin Franklin ***