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To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (20730)	8/20/1998 5:01:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

The Secret Is In The Source zdnet.com May the Source be with you. If you love something, Bill, set it free! Nah, Bill would prefer to hunt it down and kill it. War is peace, ignorance is strength, and Windows is open. This story has been simmering for the last week or so, with the AT&T payoff by Microsoft and this new Bristol suit. You can also go back a year or so to the entertaining little Embrace? / Demolish? skirmish with Citrix for a prelude to this. Open source may seem new wave, but as far as I remember it was actually standard practice in the old mainframe world as well as the Unix world, for maintenance purposes as much as anything. Of course, with the high standards for reliability Microsoft has trained us to accept, who needs it? You can always reformat, reinstall. In the past year, Microsoft has clamped down substantially on who gets access to Windows and NT source. At one point, tens, if not hundreds of companies had access to all or part of the Windows and NT source base, according to estimates by developers who have worked at firms with source-code licenses. These days, "you could count the total number of source licenses on one or two hands," said one marketing manager, who requested anonymity. What's behind the crackdown? Microsoft isn't talking, other than to say the Bristol case is without merit. But its current and former source code licensees are. Microsoft has been criticized for hiding APIs in its Windows (and Java) source code. Software developers have said that these undocumented APIs, many of which are exploited by Microsoft's own application products and developers, are of critical importance to them and their products going forward. But Bristol and some others specializing in cross-platform support say that Microsoft's "oppressive, unreasonable and unworkable" restrictions on its source code, in Bristol's words, are part of a bigger Microsoft plan to hamper non-Windows platform growth. What better way to discourage companies from buying new Unix machines than to make it difficult for applications to work properly on and across multiple platforms, so the reasoning goes. Well, it's not exactly news that Microsoft doesn't much hold with "cross-platform" applications. That goes against the DNA retrovirus / Windows World philosophy, aka the business plan. As far as trade secrets go, I'm not exactly sure where anybody would get very far stealing NT source and pushing a clone, a bit obvious when you got 35million lines to pretend you duplicated from scratch. Of course, NT got its start from stolen code, so who knows? Code gets ripped off, but it's also the ultimate documentation for a lot of things. I'm sure Bill has other means of telling us where we're going, though. Cheers, Dan.