The Iron Yuppie

Gates: 'Linux makes interoperability harder' - silicon.com

Everyone on the blogs I tend to read seems to be up in arms about the most recent Executive memo from Bill Gates. There are three things that seem to be pretty interesting to me about it. One, almost no one is reading the memo; people are reading the headlines all over the place that "Linux is not interoperable", which I did not find to be the point of the memo. Two, I've used Linux for a long time, and while there is no question that everything has a text in and text out characteristic, this does not make for interoperability. Interoperable is defined by more than simply parsing text output manually and inputting it somewhere else. And third, the real difference between the open source and proprietary models is the nature and style of the testing. Linux and OSS do minimal testing before releases, compared to the development system inside Microsoft. However, this may not be a bad thing! Because as they are developing the systems, each developer EXPECTS to do so little testing, it is much more common that the connections between the systems are less fragile. Microsoft tests the hell out of their software, but then when a key component is missing (your network latency is way too slow as an example), the software tends to fall down more. In addition to that, the Linux folks can and do cut legacy support much more quickly than the Microsoft folks, which further exacerbates the testing problems. Both sides probably agree to all these facts; the volume of disagreement probably occurs due to the visibility of the positions. Given the fundamental "engineer-ness" of everyone involved, I suspect that if they sat down on both sides of a table they'd probably both agree to 99% of the facts. It's a shame that they don't.