Attempting to show that Microsoft’s software development model has some
distinct advantages over the more amorphous model of the open source
community, Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates Tuesday drew a
parallel between the fragmentation that hobbled Unix in the ’80s and the
state of the GNU/Linux platform today.
According to eWeek, Gates told nearly 700 of Microsoft’s Most
Valuable Professionals (MVPs) at the eighth annual MVP Summit that Linux is
an “unusual kind of competition because in a way it’s out there and very
pervasive. In a way, there’s more incompatible versions of Linux than there
are of all other operating systems put together. That is, as people do
innovations on top of Linux, they don’t all get tested together and they’re
not all consistent with each other.”
And that, Gates said, means that open source development will never match
commercial software development in certain areas, especially testing,
support and innovations. As an example, eWeek said Gates turned to the
development of the Tablet PC, which required the coordination of a
handwriting group, an Office group, and a user interface group to make a
reality.
“It’s almost like a 747 where, yes, it’s easy to do a wing, it’s easy to do
a tail, but to produce a wing and a tail that work together under all
conditions, that’s tough, and that’s the position we’re in,” Gates said,
according to eWeek.
However, companies operating in the Linux space have been striving to
prevent Linux from fragmenting into proprietary and incompatible versions
as Unix did. Perhaps the clearest expression of that effort was the
creation of the Free Standards
Group in May 2000. The Free Standards Group’s mission is to lay out
common behavioral specifications, tools and APIs, to make development
across Linux distributions easier. To that end, the Free Standards Group
created the Linux Standards Base
working group, whose mission is to develop and promote a set of standards
that will increase compatibility among Linux distributions and enable
software applications to run on any compliant Linux system.
In 2002, the LSB group began offering certification of compliance with the
standards base.
In any case, Gates said Microsoft will continue to take the threat posed by
Linux seriously, as it did with other technologies that at one time or
another were predicted to kill Microsoft.
“OS/2 for about six years was that,” Gates said, according to eWeek. “And
it wasn’t a joke; it was all of IBM that was 10 times the size of Microsoft
putting all their energy, their leverage on ISVs, bundling it with their
systems, everything they could do to beat Windows, and we as a company had
to learn new things, do new things to respond to that competition.”
In fact, in its latest 10-Q filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange
Commission (SEC), Microsoft admitted, “Nonetheless, the popularization of
the Open Source movement continues to pose a significant challenge to the
company’s business model, including recent efforts by proponents of the
Open Source model to convince governments worldwide to mandate the use of
Open Source software in their purchase and deployment of software products.
To the extent the Open Source model gains increasing market acceptance,
sales of the company’s products may decline, the company may have to reduce
the prices it charges for its products, and revenues and operating margins
may consequently decline.”
