“I’ve been thinking a lot about MS and the Open Source
Community. I’ve been trying to figure out just where MS would fit
in the scheme of things if Bill suddenly lost his mind and threw
open the source up there in Redmond………And then I come to my
senses and go back to worrying about something that might
happen……like space aliens kidnapping my sister.”
“The best–and only–thing Microsoft can do for the Open Source
Community, in general, and Linux, in particular, is to ship Windows
2000. I can hardly wait. Some of my friends want to know why I am
looking forward to something I claim I will never use. It’s very
simple, really. It’s all in the numbers. Some reports have Win2K at
twenty-seven million lines of code. Some say thirty-five million. I
think that after about twenty million, it doesn’t matter….it is
doubtful even MS has enough eyeballs looking at the code to keep
track of what the hell is going on. I don’t think there is a single
company out there who does. And besides, do you think MS can
release twenty-seven million lines of ANYTHING and really get it to
work? What kind of vacuum does a company culture have to develop to
believe that you could build an operating system for the 21st
century based on Windoze NT (Not Today) 4.0 when you can’t even get
Excel spreadsheets to play nice with each other across
versions?”
“What kind of “stuff” do you have to include in an operating
system to get the line count up to 27 million lines, or 35 million,
or whatever? More dancing paper clips? “Here’s your first service
pack for win2k, it’s about 12 million lines of code.” Yeah,
right.”