[Sheflug] (Fwd) Bill Gates letter about Linux

["Perry Ismangil" <nospam [at] acm.org>]

Hi All, 

Probably many of you have read this 'leaked letter', but since I 
haven't seen it on this list, and it is actually relevant on the 
current thread "RMS Talk", here it is... 


------- Forwarded message follows ------- From: 
xxxxxxxx@microsoft.com To: "Ryan C. Gordon" Subject: Halloween 
document. 

Hey, Ryan. Been getting a kick out of your linux.com articles. 

Got something here for you. See what you think of this: 

------------Forwarded Message------------ From: "William Gates" To: 
all@microsoft.com Subject: Ghosts, Goblins, and Linux. 

Happy Halloween, everyone! It is the time of year where we review the 
Linux operating system's position again, so I thought I would sit 
down and pass on my thoughts for this year. 

A lot of buzz has been generated in the past 12 months about Linux; 
notably thanks to the popularization of more robust graphical 
environments. In this case, I am referring to the KDE and GNOME 
projects, which I will focus some time in this email on. Before KDE 
and GNOME, Linux was considered a server OS, and now, Linux has 
capture 5.6 percent of the desktop market. While 5 percent is not a 
threatning number to Microsoft, it is important to remember that 
Linux is sitting on more desktops than MacOS at this point. MacOS 
never really concerned me very much, but this should give everyone 
some 
perspective. It is also important to consider that Linux is still a 
"fad" at this time, and that number will probably drop back to less 
than one percent. 


Why will it drop? Finite resources. Linux prides itself on the "open 
source" model, which counts on programmers around the world 
contributing to a product. In theory, the idea of free labor is 
wonderful. In reality, there 
just are not that many skilled programmers willing to work for free. The 
open source zealots always try to suggest that there are thousands of 
talented coders just lying about waiting for a good project to work on. Any 
one that has programmed professionally knows that at the end of a long day 
of coding, the last thing you want to do is go home and program more for 
free. I am a programmer myself, and I feel I am accurate in that statement. 
Turn your Internet Explorer to http://www.mozilla.org/, and laugh. This is 
the product of "thousands" of hard working open source coders. We did that 
same work, and more, in-house with less than 50 people working on the 
codebase. You can not get eight, let alone ten or twelve, hour days out of 
open source coders. No one has that sort of free time. And you can not 
expect 10,000 people to offer a few lines of code each and have a coherent 
codebase. That is mere insanity, and you can see examples of such failures 
all over the internet. There is a big collection of them over at 
http://www.sourceforge.net/. The lucky projects get a couple of programmers, 
not an army, and the really lucky ones get a couple of programmers with more 
than a little spare time. This is a shame, since a lot of pretty innovative 
ideas tend to just fizzle and die. 



So, a Linux effort has finite resources to start with. Eventually a good 
idea is conceived, and executed, and on the rare occasion that it produces 
quality results, there is a split. In this case, I am referring to KDE. For 
several petty reasons I will get into later, GNOME was started in direct 
response to KDE, and began duplicating its functionality. 



The Linux pundits look at competing projects and applaud. "Competition is 
great!" they cry. I am sure everyone agrees that competition is an ideal 
that is not as glorious in reality as those sophists make it sound. In 
reality, competing projects serve only to split a finite resource further. 



I wonder if I would be writing a different letter right now if all those 
developers could focus on one system, and debug and enhance that. 
Competition is, according to the spokesmen of Linux, is supposed to 
encourage improvements to both systems in a darwinian fashion, but in fact 
both systems are still struggling to implement features we introduced in the 
first release of Windows 95. There is not much hope for these projects to 
merge. The fools are content to have theme and drag-and-drop compatibility 
and argue about the finer points of the GPL, while crucial elements like 
component subsystems grow more incompatible as time goes on. 



This brings me to the next point: infighting. The primary spokesmen for 
Linux are Richard M. Stallman, a professor, and Eric S. Raymond, a 
(self-proclaimed) writer. I won't waste your time on each's inflexible 
opinion of what Linux should be, except to note that both have a variation 
on the messages of open source's charity and selflessness. Give away your 
source code to make a better product? Doubtful. Give away your source code 
to protect your freedoms? Hardly. Ironically, both need to defend their 
feel-good mantras for purely selfish reasons. And, while both desperately 
need Linux to thrive for shameless self-promotion, the two spokesmen spend 
their time trying to show that the other is not just incorrect, but 
downright evil. They probably do as much harm as good for their cause. How 
can anyone be productive when one has to expend energy to argue the 
fundamentals of such artificial concepts as "Free Software" and "Open 
Source?" 



To continue my example, GNOME was started because KDE, an open source 
project, used an open, but not "free" library of custom controls called 
"Qt". Qt was not acceptable to the free software movement, so therefore all 
of the work done on KDE was "tainted" in their eyes. Their solution? Rewrite 
the whole thing. As GNOME work commenced, another faction began work on 
"Harmony" with the goal of replacing Qt at the API level with a "free" 
implementation. 



Threefold duplication of effort is, as you can see, Linux's answer to 
everything. Do not forget that they are doing all this work on finite 
resources, still under the false impression that this will build a better 
GUI. 



Since nothing ever really gets accomplished in the Linux market, the poor 
zealots need to celebrate every small victory. This is a community of self- 
proclaimed "hackers" that are still celebrating the successful reverse 
engineering of those silly CueCat scanners. Therefore, as soon as a company 
mentions Linux in a positive way, regardless of how insignificant, the 
slashdot.org crowd throws a virtual equivalent of Mardi Gras. More GNOME 
examples here: the creation of HelixCode, a company that has an income of 
zero dollars, and the official announcement of GNOME support by Sun 
Microsystems. In the former case, everyone will gasp when HelixCode goes 
away (after all, didn't Mr. Raymond say that Open Source could be 
profitable?), and in the later, everyone forgets immediately how they felt 
about Sun's handling of Java last year. Despite this, Mardi Gras rages on. 



Let me dwell a little longer on the topic of corporate acceptance. Years 
ago, the "problem" with Linux was a lack of hardware drivers. Today, that 
problem still exists, and even though many people seem to think otherwise, 
I've yet to hear reports of a working, let alone robust DVD player for this 
"desktop" operating system. I hear horror stories about incompatible and 
difficult to configure 3D accelerators. Linux has not gotten to the point 
where you can walk into CompUSA and grab something off the shelf and expect 
it to work in any form with the OS. This is not a new story, but it is 
downplayed more today. I can not pretend that the Linux kernel has not 
improved, but it has not improved at the rate that Torvalds and his bunch of 
merry men pretend it has, and that's largely due to companies that will not 
release hardware programming information. They aren't interested in Open 
Source, and they don't want to be troubled by it. 



Want more concrete examples? At LinuxWorld in San Jose only a few months 
ago, SGI had to find a way to explain how Linux is great while they showed 
off their IRIX technology. The magician they brought helped, I hear. Michael 
Dell can not stop babbling about this exciting new Linux while meanwhile, 
Microsoft operating systems power the computers that keep his company 
afloat. It is always good, in a truely Machiavellian sense, to pay lip 
service to industry buzzwords like "Linux", but most companies will not bet 
their payrolls on it when push comes to shove. That's why we avoid future 
bad press in our standard manner; when we announced that we would port 
Internet Explorer to Solaris, we always used the term "Unix" in our press 
releases, to give Microsoft a safety buffer. I think that's wiser in the 
long run. 



Officially, Microsoft has always kept at a safe distance with Linux. We 
leave the actually muddying to others, like Mindcraft. The average Linux 
user has a much more direct response. Generally speaking, if you were to ask 
a Linux user the benefits of Linux they will not tell you about its merits, 
but rather Windows's flaws. I am generally distrustful of anyone that 
defines themselves by what they are against and not what they are for. 



This attitude is pervasive in the community: even the leaders of this 
counter-culture act like children! If they aren't making fun of our pleads 
for Freedom to Innovate (something they do themselves, when legal processes 
stop them; ask the people at linuxvideo.org what they think of their 
"freedom to innovate" with their DVD player), then they are fighting over 
the open source license of the week, or having a spat with each other, or 
forking Samba or whatnot. 



In years past, we've discussed various ways to stop the Linux wave; we have 
considered everything from FUD to mud slinging to benchmarks to proprietary 
"standards" to force them down. The next step is usually what the Linux 
community refers to as "embrace and extend," where we make our own 
proprietary version of Linux, brand it with our trademark, and improve it 
until people would rather use our flavor than any other. At that point, we 
can lock everyone else out of the market. 



However, I don't think that will be necessary. Why on earth would Microsoft 
want to embrace this virtual kindergarten? I don't think we need that sort 
of trouble. My honest opinion? Let's do nothing. I think that sooner or 
later, these Linux fools will self-destruct without our influence. We'll see 
who has the Mardi Gras celebration then. In the meantime, I hope they enjoy 
their 5.6 percent of the desktop. It won't last. 



That's my "Halloween document" for 2000. Nothing to worry about. And for 
crying out loud, don't leak this memo this year. We all remember what 
happened to Vinod, right? 



regards, 
billg. 
------- End of forwarded message ------- 
Best regards,

Perry Ismangil

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