Wirt Atmar writes:

>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,...

I don't think that Hawking holds the Lucasian professorship by chance,
exactly.

At least, not in the way that non-physicists use the term "chance" :-).

>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.
>
>...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.

There are really two issues here. First is the reaction of the
open-source community. There's a rabid portion of the open source
community that believes that source code should be free *by rights*, and
so should software, and so should programmers' labor, and that people
should be given no choice in the matter. This is the basis for the GPL.

There's another portion -- one that I suspect is considerably larger --
who think that it does more good to release source code than not, at
least when the code doesn't implement anything of unique value. Operating
systems generally fall into that category; one is pretty much like
another in terms of technology. You can count me in that group. Note that
releasing the source code doesn't imply that any particular set of rights
is conveyed by doing so; the big-iron vendors used to release their
source code as a matter of course -- under a restrictive license.

However, Microsoft is a somewhat different matter. They sell
applications, and control the application platform. They can and do make
changes to the OS in order to lock out competitors to their application
products. Because Windows is so complex and buggy, their application
developers have a unique advantage in access to the OS source code. I've
run across code in the Microsoft Foundation Classes that is clearly there
to get around Windows bugs -- bugs that aren't documented anywhere else.
Releasing the source code -- or splitting the company into an
applications and an OS vendor -- would allow much more competition in the
applications area. (Whether either change should be accomplished by
government fiat is a different discussion.)

-- Bruce


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