Phil writes:

> Linus Torvalds and others respond eloquently to Mundie's FUD speech.
> Links at: http://scriptingnews.userland.com/backissues/2001/05/04

In that response to Mundie, Torvalds says:

========================================

"I wonder if Mundie has ever heard of Sir Isaac Newton? He's not only famous
for having basically set the foundations for classical mechanics (and the the
original theory of gravitation, which is what most people remember, along
with the apple tree story), but he is also famous for how he acknowledged the
achievement:

"If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the
shoulders of giants".

"One of the greatest scientists of our time, having done more for modern
technology (and thus, btw, for the modern economy) that Microsoft will ever
do, acknowledged the fact that he did so by being able to use the knowledge
(what we now call "intellectual property") gathered by others.

"Mundie throws all that away, because he wants Microsoft to own it all, and
make tons of money on it. I'd rather listen to Newton than to Mundie. He may
have been dead for almost three hundred years, but despite that he stinks up
the room less."

========================================

Torvalds' response is an idealized version of the truth, suggesting an
overarching altruism in the academic community, and by reflecition also in
the "open source movement," and in doing so, greatly misstates reality. There
are several fundamental issues involved in this debate, but let me primarily
only address one, intellectual property and how those who evolve it are
rewarded.

In the academic community, attribution and recognition are everything. They
are the currency of academic achievement, not money. But because attribution
and recognition are so important, they are quite often fought over much more
intensely than occurs in any business transaction I've ever been involved in.
It's the same old story. A fight for love and glory. The fundamental things
apply, as time goes by.

Because Torvalds brought Newton up, let me quote what Stephen Hawking writes
about Newton at the back of his 1988 book, "A brief history of time." By
chance, Hawking holds the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics chair at
Cambridge, exactly the same position that Newton himself held several hundred
years earlier.

Hawking writes:

========================================

"Isaac Newton was not a pleasant man. His relations with other academics were
notorious, with most of his later life spend embroiled in heated disputes.
Following publication of Principia Mathematica -- surely the most influential
book ever written in physics -- Newton had risen rapidly into public
prominence. He was appointed president of the Royal Society and became the
first scientist ever to be knighted.

"Newton soon clashed with the Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed, who had
ealier provided Newton with much needed data for Principia, but was now
withholding information that Newton wanted. Newton would not take no for an
answer; he had himself appointed to the governing body of the Royal
Observatory and then tried to force immediate publication of the data.
Eventually he arranged for Flamsteed's work to be seized and prepared for
publication by Flamsteed's mortal enemy, Edmond Halley. But Flamsteed took
the case to court and, in the nick of time, won a court order preventing
distribution of the stolen work. Newton was incensed and sought his revenge
by systematically deleting all references to Flamsteed in later editions of
Principia.

"A more serious dispute arose with the German philosopher, Gottfried Leibniz.
Both Leibniz and Newton had indepedently developed a branch of mathematics
called calculus, which underlies most of modern physics. Although we now know
that Newton discovered calculus years before Leibniz, he published his work
much later. A major row ensued over who had been first, with scientists
vigorously defending both contenders. It is remarkable, however, that most of
the articles appearing in defense of Newton were written by his own hand --
and only published in the names of friends! As the row grew, Leibniz made the
mistake of appealing to the Royal Society to resolve the dispute. Newton, as
president, appointed an "impartial" committee to investigate, coincidentally
consisting entirely of Newton's friends! But that was not all: Newton then
wrote the committee's report himself and had the Royal Society publish it,
officially accusing Leibniz of plagiarism. Still unsatisfied, he then wrote
an anonymous review of the report in the Royal Society's own periodical.
Following the death of Leibniz, Newton is reported to have declared that he
had taken great satisfaction in "breaking Leibniz's heart."

"During the period of these two disputes, Newton had already left Cambridge
and academe. He had been active in anti-Catholic politics at Cambridge, and
later in Parliament, and was rewarded eventually with the lucrative post of
Warden of the Royal Mint. Here he used his talents for deviousness and
vitriol in a more socially acceptable way, successfully conducting a major
campaign against counterfeiting, even sending several men to their death on
the gallows."

========================================

With little other information to go on, I would presume quite the opposite of
Torvalds: Mundie to be a much more decent and honorable man than Newton.

The suit that was filed by the several States' Attorneys General against
Microsoft alleged several things, the most serious among them being the
complaint by the State of California Attorney General that Microsoft
defrauded the people of California out of billions of dollars because
Microsoft sold their operating system -- an OS arguably more complex than MPE
but which HP sells for thousands of dollars -- for $89. The suit complained
that Microsoft had considered selling Windows for $39, $49, $59, etc., and
because they sold it for $50 more than the lowest price considered, the
logical conclusion was therefore that they were actively defrauding the
population of California.

Every company makes these kinds of pricing decisions, of course. They are
made on the basis of market penetration, maximization of profits, and
exclusion of competitors from the same market. At the recent Solutions
Symposium, one developer told me that if we could deliver him a copy of the
upcoming van Gogh authoring tool, he'd pay me $5000 on the spot.

As it occurs, $5000 was one of the prices we did previously discuss for van
Gogh. The bottom line in our decision making process is that the product has
to return at least one million dollars in gross revenue if we're even going
to break even on the product. That being the case, that means we would have
to sell 200 copies of van Gogh into the HP3000 developers' market. Is the
market there for that kind of penetration? I don't believe it is, and the
numbers even get worse for the $10,000, $2000, $500 prices. There is no way
we could get our money back at any of those prices, so we decided instead to
sell it for $99. In doing that, we increased the required minimum number of
sales to 10,000, and because of that, we had to change the targetted audience
(and that, in a nutshell, is what's keeping the process of releasing van Gogh
in a constant state of delay).

HP makes these same decisions every day, just as Sun, IBM, Kodak and Ben &
Jerry's does. It's an optimization process based on gut feelings, hunches,
and past successes and failures. The only real information you have is how
much you've spent and are likely to spend on the product's development.

And don't think that a good deal of the calculations don't go into devising
ways and means of excluding either existing competitors or future entrants.
That's simply good business. It's the same old story, a fight for love and
glory. The fundamental things apply, as time goes by. But it's generally done
with a great deal more good humor in the computer business than it is in
universities. Moreover, everybody knows it is a game: XFL football for nerds,
and very rarely does anyone set out to so destroy the competition that the
goal is to intentionally break anyone's heart. Rather, they simply want to
utterly destroy them, to crush them, so that they never will come back from
the dead :-)

The open source community joined in to the States' Attorneys' suit,
essentially piling on, and demanded that Microsoft release all of the
specifications -- or even better yet, the code -- for the Windows API's, both
documented and undocumented. The reason for that is the Windows emulator,
WINE, that is being developed to run under Linux would finally be capable of
being completed, and thus allowing the vast reservoir of software that was
developed for Windows to become available for the desktop version of Linux.

Without getting WINE to work, Linux as a desktop solution has no real future.
Macs now represent probably only 1% of the target audience for commerical
desktop computing, with Windows CE representing 1/10th of that, and Linux
representing 1/100th of the WinCE market. But making that demand struck me at
the time as the most unreasonable and unsupportable demand that anyone has
ever made against any body of intellectual knowledge.

Wirt Atmar

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