In article <01F76371738F71AB*_c=FR_admd=ATLAS_prmd=SG_o=INFI_s=NAYLOR_g=JONATHAN_@MHS>
you wrote:
> I hate to be a spoil sport, but the implication in your mail that Bill Gates
> was the first to produce commercial software and that before everything was
> free and open is essentially wrong (despit what Levy says).
Let's not lose sight of the fact that this splinter of discussion began with
an assertion that there wasn't any "open source software" 20 years ago...
which is clearly incorrect.
Even Levy acknowledges that things were proprietary before the hackers got
involved. Ergo the subtitle of the book, "Heroes of the Computer Revolution".
By the mid-late 70's, there were clearly "two worlds"... the IBM's and so
forth in one, and lots of engineers/students/hobbiests in the other. Gates was
the first person I was aware of who brought the first world's intellectual
property model into the second world, creating yet a third. If he had written
BASIC for a big IBM mainframe, we wouldn't have cared, and he wouldn't have
become the richest man on the planet... c'est la vie.
I feel immensely lucky to have discovered computers and have built one from
a kit of parts before all this happened. I fired my old 1802 up the other
night for the first time since about 1982, and then spent an interesting half
hour or so talking to my 7-year-old daughter about the fact that it didn't
have 'a screen, or a keyboard, or a mouse, or anything!'. The end result is
that she thinks hexadecimal is kind of neat... I guess there's hope for
her. :-)
> As much as I dislike MS and Bill Gates' tactics, he was clever enough to
> see markets and to grab them with both hands and to respond to opportunities.
Absolutely! The capitalist in me admires Gates. The computer user in me
laments the fact that the default state today is that software I might find
personally useful mostly comes without sourcecode... and is as likely to
frustrate me as enchant me. All else being equal, I'll choose a free software
solution over a proprietary solution every time.
Bdale, N3EUA
