On 16-Apr-99 Jonathan NAYLOR 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). This is only true of small
> systems.
> AFAIR in the world of mainframes and IBM, licencing of software had been
> around since
> the early 70s, when IBM unbundled the OS from the hardware. What Bill Gates
> did was
> to follow their lead.
Yes, true OS and its derivatives cost money, but you also got the source
because, unlike George 3, you needed a team of system programmers to keep the
thing up. It was only after said teams of system programmers got OS reasonably
stable and shared the results that IBM were able to decide that they would no
longer provide source and start charging squillions (whatever happened to
iebupdite?)
>
> 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.
>
Yes, with products that have bugs and security that (for instance) allows
people to send e-mail that firtles with essential bits of the operating system
without the recipients (immediate) knowledge, could do untold damage and yet
NOBODY complains or sues! If anybody had done this we would be talking about
them in the past tense.
THAT is marketing!
> As much as I like free software, and I've written enough myself, I would
> not hesitate
> to make millions out of software if I could. Aside from the good
> intentions, I have a
> family to support and they come first, period.
>
!
Dirk G1TLH
---
Dirk-Jan Koopman, Tobit Computer Co Ltd
At the source of every error which is blamed on the computer you will find
at least two human errors, including the error of blaming it on the computer.
