John Naughton
There is a saying in the computer business that “only the paranoid survive”. The man who has taken it most to heart is Microsoft’s Bill Gates. The pace of change in the computing industry is such that if you blink you might not spot the threat. Gates blinked spectacularly in 1994, when Netscape was founded.
This makes the leaked August 1998 internal memorandum, written by Microsoft engineer Vinod Valloppillil to explain to his bosses the threat posed by Linux, so interesting.
To appreciate the memo’s significance, you need to remember that Microsoft dominates the world market in “operating systems”. The Windows operating system is the jewel in Gates’s crown, and anything that threatens it threatens his company’s dominance.
Microsoft’s long-term strategy is to move us all on to a version of it called Windows NT (for “new technology”). But NT is in trouble. The release date for the next version has been postponed so often that it has had to be renamed “Windows 2000”. And as NT flounders, the world’s attention has focused on a rival operating system called Linux which offers many of the same facilities as NT, is incredibly reliable – and is free.
Linux is powerful and stable because it was created by clever people working collaboratively on the source code and because it’s been tested to destruction by more programmers than Microsoft could ever muster. The memo argues that Open Source software (OSS) is now as good as – if not better than – commercial alternatives, concedes that “the ability of the OSS process to collect and harness the collective IQ of thousands of individuals across the Internet is simply amazing” and concludes that Linux is too diffuse a target to be destroyed by the tactics which have hitherto vapourised Microsoft’s commercial rivals.
The people who built Linux cannot be driven out of business, because they’re not in business. Henceforth, Microsoft will be fighting not another company, but an idea. The reason Linux is so powerful, reasons Valloppillil, is that its basic building blocks – its technical protocols – are free, openly distributed and not owned by anyone.
The only way to kill it, therefore, is for Microsoft to capture the protocols by pretending to adopt them and then “extending” them in ways that effectively make them proprietary. The new Microsoft revisions will – surprise, surprise – be incompatible with the “free” versions. Gates calls this process “embrace and extend”. In reality, it’s “copy and corrupt”.
The coming battle will be between closed shop versus Open Source, commercial paranoia versus altruism. The outcome is already predictable.