[Reader-list] Bill to Linus: You Owe Me.

[Jaswinder Singh Kohli]

 Bill to Linus: You Owe Me.
Did Bill Gates Invent Open Source Software? No, But He'll Take Credit
For It, Anyway

By Robert X. Cringely



Thanksgiving week is always difficult for me. PBS wants my column early,
of course, but the real problem is that much of what I write is often
lost to readers, obscured by the effects of whatever that chemical is in
turkey meat that makes us fall asleep. People simply don't remember what
I write that week, which is of course, this week. I have to work all the
harder to shock them out of their holiday stupor. So the shocking
questions for this week are 1) Is Bill Gates really the father of the
Open Source software movement? and; 2) If Bill isn't the father of Open
Source, did he violate a crucial IBM nondisclosure agreement and ought
to pay billions in damages to Big Blue as a result?

It is hard to imagine Bill Gates claiming to have started -- or even
helped to start -- the Open Source movement, especially since he has
been widely quoted as once describing it as communism. But claiming
paternity he kinda, sorta did at Microsoft's recent annual meeting while
answering questions from shareholders.

Here is the fateful question: "It appears to me that the open source
movement is gaining momentum, and as I understand it, the key to success
of a software product involves efficiently building an ecosystem of
developers and users, resellers, and so forth. Isn't the open source
model a more efficient paradigm for building such a community around
your products, and isn't perhaps Microsoft maybe on the wrong side of
that trend of long-term?"

And here is the answer from Bill Gates, or at least the first part of it
(the complete answer, which is quite long and circuitous, can be found
under one of the "I Like It" links on this page): "Let me start out,
really the reason that you see open source there at all is because we
came in and said there should be a platform that's identical with
millions and millions of machines, and the BIOS of that should be open
to everybody to use, and all the extensibility should be there. And so
it was very predictable that once we had gotten the PC going, and going
and gotten hundreds of millions of machines out there, that it had
always been sort of free software and the universities would flourish
and there would be more of that..."

I guess we can forget, then, about MITS giving to the world the S-100
bus, Gary Kildall inventing the ROM-BIOS for his CP/M operating system,
and Steve Wozniak creating the Apple II as an open architecture with
millions of users. Microsoft even made CP/M cards that could be
installed in Apple IIs. And all this was years before the IBM PC and
PC-DOS were introduced in 1981.

The gist of Bill's argument is that Open Source requires a large
pre-installed base of genetically identical computers, and that base was
provided by DOS and Windows. Okay, maybe we can buy that. But then Bill
goes on to claim that the BIOS -- the Basic Input-Output System that
sits between the operating system and the computer hardware -- "should
be open to everybody to use." Tell that one to IBM, which somehow
thought the IBM PC BIOS was their property. They held a copyright on it,
after all. Compaq Computer spent over $1 million reverse-engineering the
IBM PC BIOS to create the first IBM PC clone. If Microsoft had been
working so hard to open up that BIOS, Compaq could have saved their
money.

What WAS Microsoft's role in opening-up the PC BIOS? If they were,
indeed, pioneers in this effort, then they were, as one of my canny
readers suggested, violating an IBM non-disclosure agreement, and would
have been subject to billions in penalties. That was long ago, and the
statute of limitations has expired, so Bill might well be telling the
truth, admitting that he had deliberately undermined his old partner,
the company that made Microsoft what it is today. Or Bill could be
bending the truth a bit, though I can't imagine why. Frankly, neither
answer makes Microsoft look very good.

I needed another source to help me converge on the truth, so I e-mailed
Jack Sams in Florida. Jack was the guy from IBM who was sent to Seattle
to meet with Microsoft back in 1980, and tell them about the
still-secret IBM PC. Jack was also the guy who mistook Gates for an
office boy at the start of that meeting.

And Jack had a lot to say on this subject:

"Bill responded like a true politician by switching the question from
Open Source to Freeware (ugh), then to Open Architecture (read de facto
standards), which he claims to have prompted IBM to adopt for the PC,"
said Sams. "Bill did, in fact, influence the IBM PC interface
architecture, but our "open architecture" decision was ab initio.

"Your (reader) challenged Gates' claim by noting that the (IBM BIOS
CHIP) is highly proprietary. He didn't distinguish the copyrighted chip
from the interface architecture it implements. The chip is indeed
copyrighted and could be infringed. The open architecture it supports
was extended by Paul Allen's DOS 2.1 to actually support dynamic
addition of features and capabilities at run time. This (DOS +BIOS) open
architecture has been public domain since it first shipped ( Byzantine,
but open).

"So, everyone is more or less right. Bill remains an artful dodger and a
selective rememberer, but, aren't we all?

"Here's the open architecture/BIOS history as I saw it during 1980.

"IBM's (August 1980) product development plan for the PC assumed almost
from day one that we would have to rely on a number of independent,
third party hardware and software developers to respond to the demands
of a mass market. (think programming languages, word processors, games,
spreadsheets, joysticks and classroom drill, a million machines and a
three year program)... We consciously intended to host other vendors
independently developed software, and we were almost completely
dependent on third party peripheral devices (color video, disk, tape,
printer, communications) because our own available I/O was hardwired for
EBCDIC date encoding.

"The product strategy demanded a reliably defined interface that allowed
other vendors' hardware to physically and logically attach to the PC bus
and for other vendors' software to access all system services. The
assembler source code that implemented this "BIOS" was written by David
Bradley, of IBM, in Seattle, in consultation with Microsoft. Its design
was limited by three givens:

1) Microsoft's 8086 version of ROM BASIC.
2) The 8 bit I/O bus and device control architecture inherited from the
IBM Datamaster (a failed earlier attempt to build an IBM PC).
3) The existing 8088 motherboard design that was planned as an upgrade
for the Datamaster.

"These hardware "bootstraps" were never acknowledged in the "official
histories" by IBM, and may well have been concealed from Bill Gates
until early 1981... hence his claim to have persuaded us to use a 16-bit
chip. Somebody nodded wisely and said "good idea", but the 8088
prototypes were already running in August with IBM 8-bit I/O.

"The BIOS code was written very early (in September/October 1980),
during the first (consulting) agreement we negotiated with Microsoft in
August 1980. It established the infamous 640K memory boundary and other
simplifying conventions to allow the system to be run entirely from ROM.
IBM copyrighted the CHIP and published the interfaces at first customer
shipment. (I'm sure there were arguments against publishing until the
last minute, and Bill would certainly have had an input; but that's just
my opinion, I was out of the loop after November 1980)

"At this level, Bill Gates can certainly claim to have "influenced" the
open architecture strategy. He was our consultant, he had practical
experience interfacing BASIC to a succession of systems with a variety
of ASCII I/O devices and device controllers, and he was the first, we
expected, of many vendors whose products would become replaceable parts
in PC systems.

"However, the "open architecture" strategy was entirely deliberate on
IBM's part. We expected to defend our own hardware market:

1) By being the lowest cost producer of the core system, and
2) By asserting copyright protection for the bios chip(s).
3) By quickly offering a series of cheaper, faster, better upward
compatible systems and upgrades.
4) By staying out of the PC software development business.

"All were relatively successful strategies through the PC, PC/XT, and
PC/AT, although our reliance on overseas suppliers set the stage for the
PC/AT clone takeover as soon as there was a reliable source of reverse
engineered BIOS chips.

"When the PC Division began to plan an 80386/AT in 1983, the IBM
Corporate Management Committee took the business back from Don Estridge
and directed its new management to redevelop the PC as a proprietary IBM
product with "normal" profit margins and a full range of proprietary
software and I/O.

"So sad."

Bill dodges another one.

Those interested in slightly more recent computer history might want to
know about next week's celebration of the first 10 years of QuickTime,
Apple's extensible multimedia technology. The amazing thing about
Quicktime is that there was nothing like it before, and everything has
been like it since. Look at the guts of Real Player or Windows Media
Player, and you'll see structural copies of QuickTime. It is very hard
to be an original, to be the first, and to still survive a decade later,
but Quicktime does all that. And it might even get the last laugh. Apple
is rumored to be preparing an MPEG-4 player for Quicktime (the Quicktime
file format is already used by MPEG-4), which ought to give the system
perpetual legs and a real advantage against more proprietary solutions
from Real and Microsoft.

Back in 1990 when Apple first conceived of QuickTime, the world of
"multimedia" was one of laserdiscs. A multimedia application was a
Hypercard stack connected bya serial cable to a Macintosh. The stack let
you navigate to a particular clip. The video was then played on a TV
screen. In 1991, the big step forward was to display that video on the
computer screen... but you still needed the laserdisc. And when Apple
management announced QuickTime in 1990, the idea was very much about
perpetuating and supporting that model. The QuickTime team subverted
that whole system by saying that every PC (Mac!) should be able to play
video on its own... no special hardware. So they developed software only
video and audio that scaled itself to match the users machine. Constrast
this to the PC industry which in 1992 was obsessed with multimedia PC,
which was basically just a sound card plugged into a stock PC. Miles
apart. The QuickTime work put in the foundation for ground breaking
titles like MYST and Peter Gabriel's XPLORA 1, and set the model that
was later followed for MPEG-4 and DVD.

Work on QuickTime 1.0 was completed on December 2, 1991, with a product
launch at the San Francisco MacWorld show in January 1992. There will be
a party, of course, held on December 1st in San Francisco to celebrate
the anniversary. Proceeds are earmarked to raise funds for a permanent
QuickTime museum exhibit. And all this is because a nonprofit,
all-volunteer organization called Friends of Time is determined to
secure the place of QuickTime in technology history. Their web site is
listed among the "I Like It" links.

Now if only there was a similar group called Friends of Bob.



--


Regards
Jaswinder Singh Kohli
jskohli at fig.org
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The Uni(multi)verse is a figment of its own imagination.
In truth time is but an illusion of 3D frequency grid programs.