Linux Online - Eric S. Raymond: Thank you, Microsoft, but no thanks!

Eric S. Raymond: Thank you, Microsoft, but no thanks!


Publication:	Newsforge	Date:	Nov 10 2001

In remarks at a Microsoft stockholders' meeting, Bill Gates recently claimed that Microsoft was responsible for the success of open source.

As an exercise in retroactive imperialism, this is little short of breathtaking. It ignores the fact that though the open-source culture wouldn't get public visibility until after 1993, or a name for itself until 1998, it already existed well before the foundation of Microsoft in 1975. Many of today's most active hackers can readily remember a time when the typical response to the word "Microsoft" was "Who are they?" -- and some of our most important work (such as the Berkeley TCP/IP stack that Microsoft itself copied and used) was written years before the computing landscape flattened into PCs as far as the eye can see.