[ 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.”