Gates undaunted by Linux, Oct 02, 2004

Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates, during an appearance here Friday at the Computer History Museum, expressed no fear of Linux usurping Windows in the software industry.

Speaking to technologists, Gates touched briefly on a number of topics ranging from Linux to Web services to grid computing and digital rights management. As far as Linux goes, Microsoft has seen other potential threats to its dominance come and go, Gates stressed.

Sun Microsystems Inc.'s combative chief executive, Scott McNealy, fresh from resolving his long-running quarrel with archrival Microsoft Corp., has found a new target for his wrath: Linux software maker Red Hat Inc.

''We love Linux," said McNealy at yesterday's meeting of the Massachusetts Telecommunications Council in Newton. ''We just don't love Red Hat."

Like many of us, Andrew Greig put a WiFi access point in his house so he could share his broadband Internet connection. But like hardly any of us, Andrew uses his WiFi network for Internet, television, and telephone. He cancelled his telephone line and cable TV service. Then his neighbors dropped-by, saw what Andrew had done, and they cancelled their telephone and cable TV services, too, many of them without having a wired broadband connection of their own. They get their service from Andrew, who added an inline amplifier and put a better antenna in his attic. Now most of Andrew's neighborhood is watching digital TV with full PVR capability, making unmetered VoIP telephone calls, and downloading data at prodigious rates thanks to shared bandwidth. Is this the future of home communications and entertainment? It could be, five years from now, if Andrew Greig has anything to say about it.

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