We’ve been hearing for ages now how GPL’ed code was going to kill innovation and destroy the computing industry. Here’s some stuff about it, straight from Redmond, but funny how the video uses a format that is, um, less than universal. If they really want to get their message out beyond their own community, you’d think someone would realize a more platform-neutral format would be a good choice, even as an alternate. Nope, it’s our way or the highway.
So Apple decides not to wait around for MSIE to get any better on its platform. Now, in many cases, when you might lose a customer’s business — after all, the five year deal to make IE the preferred browser has been over for awhile — you redouble your efforts in hopes of retaining that business. Not so at Microsoft. Evidently, you assume you’re still the only game in town and there’s no need to do a better job. I have often used the phrase “institutional arrogance” to describe their behavior: this seems to be a good example.
With IE languishing and upstarts like Chimera and stalwarts like Mozilla/Netscape making gains, Apple takes a look at the state of the field and chooses the KHTML rendering engine from the KDE project’s Konqueror browser (ironically, in KDE, it functions much like IE with file and LAN browsing built-in) as the basis for its free browser.
Not only that, they make a lot of improvements to the code base, give those away, as the GPL requires, and release a detailed changelog.
This makes for very interesting reading: there is already a bit of KDE code in Sherlock, apparently, and it’s instructive to see the Apple guys talking to the KDE developers as peers.
So where is the huge danger if other companies do this? How is Apple harmed by taking a freely available good — the KHTML and KJS code — making it better, and then giving away what they add? They save time, gain credibility, make friends, and lose . . . . what, exactly?
Obviously, it all comes down to your business model. Apple’s is to sell computers and the way to do that is to make them more valuable to people than any other on the market. Microsoft’s model is to sell licenses to use their software, ostensibly by making it best of breed, but more often by locking customers in. Where Apple will let you run anyone’s apps on their hardware, even as they make free and competitive offerings, Microsoft can’t and won’t let that happen.
How long will it be before some IT decisionmaker loses his job for buying into the hype, only to find he’s locked his company into a situation it can’t get out of?
Some reading I found through Google . . . .
http://digitalpilgrim.com/personal/osinnovate.html
http://joshua.editthispage.com/2001/02/16
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gpl-american-way.html
http://www.zepa.net/hypermail/elug/2001/02/0113.html
http://archive.salon.com/tech/col/leon/2001/05/03/microsoft_gpl/