 |
Index Web citations
|
|
There is a saying in the computer business that ‘only the paranoid survive’. The man who has taken it most to heart is Microsoft’s Boss of Bosses, Bill Gates. Although he is the richest man alive and his company has a stranglehold on the world’s computer screens, Gates is forever looking over his shoulder, trying to spot the newcomer who will wipe him out.  One can understand his anxiety.
The pace of change in the computing industry is such that if you blink you might not spot
the threat. Gates himself blinked spectacularly in 1994, when Netscape was founded. He
failed to appreciate the looming significance of the Internet, and Netscape had captured a
huge slice of the Web-browser market before he woke up. From that moment onwards,
Microsoft’s corporate ingenuity was devoted to finding ways of crushing Netscape. Its
crass attempts to do so eventually stung the US Department of Justice into launching the
anti-trust suit which is currently being decided in an American court. But while the eyes
of the media are on the trial, those of the Net community have been focussed elsewhere -
on a leaked Microsoft internal memorandum which is far more revealing than anything
released in court. For it shows that Gates & Co have finally realised where the Next
Big Threat is coming from. And it’s nothing to do with Netscape - or browsers.
They’re yesterday’s battlegrounds.The leaked memo is now all over the Net. It was written by a Microsoft engineer called Vinod Valloppillil last August, but is universally known as the ‘Halloween Memo’ because it was leaked last weekend. Its purpose is to explain to Microsoft bosses the nature and extent of the threat posed by a free operating system called Linux and the ‘Open Source’ software development community that built it. To appreciate the memo’s
significance, you need to remember that Microsoft dominates the world market in
‘operating systems’ – the complex programs which transform computers from
paperweights into machines which can do useful work. The Windows operating system is the
jewel in Gates’s crown, and anything that threatens it threatens his company’s
dominance. Microsoft’s long-term
strategy is to move us all onto a version of it called Windows NT (for ‘new
technology’). But NT is in trouble. The release date for the next version has been
postponed so often that it has had to be renamed ‘Windows 2000’. And as NT
flounders, the world’s attention has increasingly focussed on a rival operating
system called Linux which offers many of the same facilities as NT, is incredibly stable
and reliable - and is free. Anyone can download it, free gratis, from the Net. Linux is free because it was developed collectively across the Net by skilled programmers working in the Open Source tradition which created the Internet and which holds that software should be freely accessible to the community. The name comes from the fact that ‘source code’ is computer-speak for the original version of a program - as distinct from the version you buy and install on your computer. If you have the source code you can do what you like with it – alter it, damage it, improve it, whatever. Linux is powerful and stable
because it was created by clever people working collaboratively on the source code and
because it’s been tested to destruction by more programmers than Microsoft could ever
muster. The Halloween Memo warns Gates that Linux and its ilk pose a serious threat to
Microsoft. It argues that Open Source software is now as good as – if not better than
– commercial alternatives, concedes that ‘the ability of the OSS process to
collect and harness the collective IQ of thousands of individuals across the Internet is
simply amazing’, and concludes that Linux is too diffuse a target to be destroyed by
the tactics which have hitherto vapourised Microsoft’s commercial rivals. The people
who built Linux cannot be driven out of business, because they’re not in business.
Henceforth, Microsoft will be fighting not another company, but an idea. The Halloween Memo provides a chilling glimpse into the Darth Vader mindset of Microsoft. The reason Linux is so powerful, reasons Valloppillil, is that its basic building blocks – its technical protocols - are free, openly distributed and not owned by anyone. The only way to kill it therefore is for Microsoft to capture the protocols by pretending to adopt them and then ‘extending’ them in ways that effectively make them proprietary. The new (Microsoft) revisions will – surprise, surprise! - be incompatible with the ‘free’ versions. Gates calls this process ‘embrace and extend’. In reality it’s ‘copy and corrupt’. The coming battle, then, will
be between two philosophies – closed shop versus Open Source, commercial paranoia
versus altruism and trust. The outcome is already predictable. Microsoft’s
difficulties with Windows NT show that some software is now too complex for even the
richest, smartest company. Instead of trying to suborn Linux, what Gates should do is
release the NT code and let the collective IQ of the Net fix it for him. He won’t do
it, of course, which is why his company has just peaked. If you have Microsoft shares,
prepare to sell them now. |
|
||
 |
Where this was published
|
|||||
| |
 |
