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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Charles Tutt who wrote (59874)	7/15/2001 3:11:55 PM
From: Joseph Pareti	Respond to of 74651

yes of course IBM software has been dirt cheap ever since because they were spooked by open source :-)

To: Charles Tutt who wrote (59874)	7/15/2001 3:59:45 PM
From: Bill Fischofer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

Re: IBM software bundling At the risk of further admitting my age let's take another slightly off-topic walk down memory lane. I say slightly because so many of today's hot-button issues are merely trends coming full circle. In the golden age of mainframe computing (up to the late 1970s) all IBM software was both "free" and "open source". Software was viewed as just a means of selling hardware and in fact one of the many complaints against IBM was that nobody else could make a business from software since IBM basically gave everything away. Innovation, by today's standards, was as a result glacial. As a "concession" in its ongoing legal battles, IBM introduced the then-novel concept of a "program product" which was software that was separately priced and that customers actually had to pay for. Originally these were add-ons and somewhat enhanced versions of standard products but soon IBM realized there was real money to be made in software. As a result IBM in the early 1980s greatly expanded this idea and in an effort to protect its now-valuable software introduced the then-radical notion of "object code only (OCO)" software distributions. It's difficult to adequately communicate the passion that the OCO issue aroused among customers at the time. Early bulletin board systems fairly groaned under the weight of posts on this topic. One of the reasons I joined IBM in 1983 was because I wanted to continue to have access to operating system source code. Source code was viewed akin to scripture among many techies as a unique repository of knowledge and common culture. The notion that it would be taken away was heresy of the highest order. Yet, IBM's decision and precedent resulted in an explosion of innovation. Once it was possible to make money writing and selling software thousands of companies were founded to do exactly that. The result was that the 1980s saw a pace of innovation in software which was completely unprecedented. Of course the pendulum swings both ways. Today "open source" is viewed as a "radical" notion which threatens the current world order. It does, but the world order needs a good shove every twenty years or so lest it grow too stale and complacent, which is why Linux is so important to the future course of innovation in computing. Again the market and not the courts is the driving force here.