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T A B L E__T A L K Is the Net doomed to be a white village? Weigh in on race and the Web in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y This is just between us, right?
Royal treatment for game reviewers
Gun mad
Black and white and Web all over
21st Challenge No. 8
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FREE THE WINDOWS SOURCE CODE? | PAGE 2 OF 2 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Microsoft's success on the Internet recently drove its competitor Netscape to take the radical step of releasing the source code to its Navigator browser, opening the way for thousands of independent developers to fix its bugs and add new features. Why doesn't Microsoft -- whose mantra has always been "embrace and extend" -- embrace this movement as well and publish the source code to the entire Windows operating system? Never happen, I hear you say. It's just not in Microsoft's blood. Maybe so. It's a sufficiently unlikely possibility that we included it in our April Fool's spoof, "Microsoft throws in the towel." What could possibly impel Gates to give away his company's crown jewel? Well, there was that intensely embarrassing incident earlier this week when Windows 98 crashed as Gates was demoing it for a crowd at Spring Comdex. One of the most persuasive arguments offered by free-software movement (or "open source") advocates like Eric Raymond is that most commercial software products today are simply too monstrously huge to test properly. In other words, even a company as big as Microsoft is never going to find all the bugs in Windows 98. Microsoft already conducts laborious public beta tests of most of its major products, and the line between the "final beta" and the shrink-wrapped product has become quite blurred. At some future point, it may simply become more efficient for Microsoft to open up its source code and let developers fix the bugs themselves. In a provocative piece in Feed last week, "Where Do You Want to Go Tomorrow?", Steven Johnson challenged some of Microsoft's leading critics -- including Lotus founder Mitch Kapor, Ralph Nader technology advisor Jamie Love and Eric Raymond -- to paint their visions of alternatives to a Microsoft-owned operating system. Each answer was a variation on the free-software ideal (which is less about giving software away than about "freeing" the underlying source code for anyone to modify). There's a growing chorus maintaining that, for pragmatic as well as idealistic reasons, we'll all be using an "open source" operating system sooner or later. But the cherished icons of the free-software world to date, like the operating system Linux and the Web server Apache, fall mostly under the umbrella of Unix operating systems -- a paradise to hackers but something of a wilderness for most everyday users. The only free-software operating system able to win the hearts and minds of millions of today's Windows users would have to be some version of Windows itself. What other inducements might persuade Gates to free the Windows code? Such a move would have the immediate salutary effect of getting all those lawyers off Microsoft's back. Poof! -- the monopoly's gone. It would also help rekindle the general public's guttering sense of trust in the company. In an odd way, it would be a return to Microsoft's most admirable roots: DOS and Windows won their battle with competitors like the Macintosh largely because they worked on an open hardware platform -- pretty much anyone could build a PC that would run these systems. That created the healthy competitive ecology of today's PC marketplace; an open operating-system platform could do the same for the software industry, huge swaths of which Microsoft would still dominate. Of course, Microsoft makes billions from the sale of its operating systems. I'm not holding my breath waiting for it to toss that cash out the window. I'm not saying freeing the Windows source is going to happen tomorrow. And I'm not saying I think it's necessarily the best business strategy for Microsoft to pursue. But it's not just gadflies like Raymond who tell us that "Microsoft is doomed"; Gates himself now regularly announces how vulnerable he believes his company is to each new wave of change in the technology industry. If the future is as dire as Gates maintains, Microsoft would do well to think about the unthinkable. It's happened before. Back in 1995, when Microsoft was playing catch-up with Netscape in the browser arena, Gates executed one of the most effective corporate repositionings in recent history. Till then, Microsoft had pretty much ignored the Internet in pursuit of its own proprietary network; but the company "turned on a dime" and began building the Internet into every one of its products -- leading to the current antitrust battle. For the open-code Windows scenario to come true, Microsoft would have to be in a much weaker business position than it's in today. But somewhere down the line, the company may be staring at a growing mountain of legal trouble. It may confront an unmanageably vast load of user support problems. Its engineers may face an impossible-to-meet calendar for debugging Windows 2001 or Windows NT 6.0. And somebody in Redmond just might throw up his hands in dismay and take a big, brave risk.
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Let my software go: An interview with Eric Raymond. By Andrew Leonard. |
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