AnchorDesk/Yahoo!: Why we should hail IBM's ode to open source--the Purple Book

Aug 16, 2001, 00:04 (17 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Patrick Houston)

[ Thanks to apk for this link. ]

"The marquee name on this panel was Bill Gates, who probably programmed MS-DOS with his own personal copy of the Purple Book at his side. Thanks to IBM's unprecedented openness for the time, Bill Gates was on his way to becoming the world's richest man. Yet today his company is the most vocal critic of the open-source movement and the GPL.

While Microsoft has embraced a policy of sharing source code--with select customers--it's still a far cry from mimicking the IBM of 1981.

Just as IBM launched the PC industry by embracing openness 20 years ago, I wonder whether Big Blue will go into the history books as playing a similarly significant role today by taking a similar stance."

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• CNET: IBM said what? ("IBM is the antithesis of open source.")(Aug 04, 2001)