An open letter to Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer Letter
By newsdesk(a)theinquirer.net
The Letterman: Saturday 25 October 2003, 15:16
Messrs William Gates Jnr & Steven Ballmer
Microsoft Corporation
One Microsoft Way
Redmond Washington,
USA
Dear Sirs
I see you have been active again in making interesting and to some degree highly amusing
statements about Free/Libre Open Source Software and the many and varied people who make
up its community. I in particular would like to thank Mr. Steven Ballmer for your
entertaining exposee of Linux's deepest, darkest secret - that it can seriously worry
the senior executive of a convicted predatory monopoly, without that ever having been the
intention of its principal software designer and initial developer. I would also like to
thank you for humming and hawing around the question of the release of source code to
people who can use it, in the light of the new MVP source code entitlement program. Well,
are they deserving members of the Windows development team or not? In relation to your
comments, Steve Ballmer, on Linux's "road map", I will refrain from
expounding on Linus Torvalds' comment on the cover of one of Bill Gates' books,
showing him standing in the middle of an empty road. It's not nice to make jokes like
that, is it, Your Billness? Road kill is no joke, even if some enterprising chef has
written a book about it. No, I have something else on my mind, something much more worthy.
I would like to challenge you to a software coding bake-out, a bet to see which
methodology works, and which doesn't. You have made some progress with your NT source
tree, anyone can see that - Windows 2k3 is a more serious product than Windows XP, and
definitely a more realistic - and much more massive - product than Windows 95.
Congratulations. You have also declared that Windows 95, Windows NT 3.x and NT 4.x are
discontinued, end-of-line, unsupported products. And Windows 98 is shortly going to be in
the same category, having already been discontinued. And Microsoft is attempting to roll
the Win9x features into the NT line. XP is the nearest you have come to success. In the
process, Windows users have enjoyed an interesting remote use of RPC and other features
that might otherwise bug you. And in the process you have put back Longhorn's release
date.
My challenge is this - release the entire range of discontinued, end-of-line and
unsupported Operating Systems mentioned above (Win9x, NT 3.x and Win4.x) and their related
utilities and Productivity Applications, as Open Source under the BSD/MIT license, since
you have stated at sundry times and in diverse manners that that license is one you can
live with. You are of course expected to sanitise the source trees - we don't want
trouble with absurd IP cases. Release the sanitised source trees, minus any bits and
pieces of third-party encumbered code Microsoft may have in the Win9x and NT 3.x and 4.x
source trees, to the ftp servers at the MIT, ibiblio, the U of Calif. at Berkeley, and the
U of Cambridge, UK, with prominent notices stating that they are released under the terms
of the BSD/MIT licenses placed in
slashdot.org,
newsforge.com,
computerworld.com,
news.com.com,
www.theinquirer.net and
www.theregister.co.uk and other industry news
outlets.
My bet is that in the time it takes Microsoft to come up with a half-way decent Windows
product, the Open Source development process starting from an earlier, identical initial
source tree without constraints will produce one better. The length of time is going to be
the same. On one side you have the multi-billion dollar transnational corporation, on the
other you have an amorphous world-wide community. One has a head start, but the code bases
for this challenge are the same. The only catch - Microsoft is not allowed to use the
source code produced by the open source effort until after it has rolled out Longhorn -
thus preserving the independence of the challengers, who will not have access to the
Longhorn source tree. After the challenge has finished and the bets have been tallied up,
then it is a totally different story, because the BSD/MIT license doesn't prohibit
incorporation within a closed-source code base, only the denial of attribution. But should
Microsoft use the independent effort's code during such a challenge, it would be an
admission that the Free/Libre Open Source community is right, and must be met with an
appropriate forfeit - the sanitising and opening of the Longhorn source tree. I propose in
the interim that the challenge in the interim be named something other than Windows or
Office - precisely what will have to be decided upon later.
So, there you have it. Are either of you betting men, able to face a challenge?
Yours Sincerely
Wesley Parish
(wes.parish(a)paradise.net.nz)
Source:
http://www.theInquirer.net/?article=12331