Re: require Gates to download and use Linux for the next 5 years

[Case Roole <cjr@xs4all.nl>]

On Sun, 05 Dec 1999, Marty Leisner wrote:
> There was an interview with Gates in Forbes ("Gates unplugged")
> 
> http://www.forbes.com/forbes/99/1213/6414076a.htm
> 
> On whether he has ever programmed in Linux, the freebie operating
> system: "Well, Linux is just a form of Unix, and I certainly did a lot of
> programming in Unix. The fact that the free-software community can
> take that 25-year-old thing and say, 'Okay, here it is'--there's nothing
> phenomenal about that. And so, no, I've never actually used it on a
> machine. I've certainly had demos with it, but it's not anything I've
> used." 
> 
> 
> Amazing he can call Linux "a 25-year-old-thing".

More amazing is that he keeps changing the numbers. As he said about Linux for
a Danish national radio broadcast in February 1999: 

"Ha-ha. There has been a history of free software coming out of the university
environments. The original browser was a free product. There's a webserver
called Apache there's a free product. And in almost any category of software
you find free software. 
Typical what we have with Linux is essential UNIX as it was defined twenty
years ago.  
And people get a kick out of having the source code - gives the possibility to
play around with that. 
What we're trying to do with Windows is solve a different kind of problem.
We're trying to create a system that is much richer in terms of the graphics
and system management.''

Aside from moving the year by five years, which incidentally was placed at 30
years in Microsoft's "Linux Myths" document that was also published in 1999,
Gates makes clear that there is no reason to take Linux seriously as
competition to Windows. Clearly Gates has given judge Jackson good reason to
discount what Microsoft's lawyers and economists cooked up for him about Linux.

-cjr