[Am-info] Fw: Thank you, Microsoft, but no thanks!

[Mitch Stone]

--- From a message sent by Joe Barr on 11/9/01 1:33 PM ---

>In remarks at a Microsoft stockholders' meeting, Bill Gates recently
>claimed that Microsoft was responsible for the success of open source.
>
>"Really," he said "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."
>
>As an exercise in retroactive imperialism, this is little short of
>breathtaking.  It ignores the fact that though the open-source culture
>wouldn't get public visibility until after 1993, or a name for itself
>until 1998, it already existed well before the foundation of Microsoft
>in 1975.  Many of today's most active hackers can readily remember a
>time when the typical response to the word "Microsoft" was "Who are
>they?" -- and some of our most important work (such as the Berkeley
>TCP/IP stack that Microsoft itself copied and used) was written years
>before the computing landscape flattened into PCs as far as the eye
>can see.

Right response, wrong reason. Surprisingly, Eric Raymond has missed the 
fundamental irony in Gates' boast -- that Microsoft did not "standardize" 
the hardware platform, IBM did (unwittingly, but still). Gates made a 
similarly hyperbolic claim in his Senate testimony in 1998,

"Another sign of a healthy competitive industry is lower prices. The 
statistics show that the cost of computing has decreased 10 million-fold 
since 1971. That's the equivalent of getting a Boeing 747 for the price 
of a pizza. Consumers see the results of this innovation and falling 
prices in software today."

Nobody called him on that one, either, as I recall.

 Mitch Stone  
 mitch@accidentalexpert.com