Typical Microsoft

[linuxgeek]

It's commonly believed that Gates stole the Linux kernal for XP.

XP isn't stable enough to be a linux kernel.

 

[xssve]

Well naturally, not after the patented Microsoft macrobloat process.

 

[xssve]

How do you steal an open source kernel?

If it's open source, then it has to be, uh open source?

Gates created the third party software industry with DOS, which was open source, i.e., the source code was available, and third party software developers could develop programs that worked well with the operating system - a lot of programming is memory management, error trapping, etc.

A well behaved program doesn't hog memory, and it returns it when it's done, etc., and for that you really need to know how the OS is handling memory.

I can get Twenty or Thirty instantiations of Firefox at once for example, in fact I've never actually reached the limit so far, while after a dozen instantiations of IE, I'm out of memory, and closing some of them doesn't help, I'm gradually forced down to two or three, and then I have to reboot to get my memory back, it's fucking ridiculous, the thing is a memory hole.

Anyway, starting with Windows, all your programming is done through the Windows interface, called the Windows foundation classes - you don't even interact directly with the operating system you can only access it through the foundation classes, which is a whole separate overlay on top of the OS, and in order to get the gouge on that, you have to join the MS developers network - and what they were doing is cutting developers out of the network if they they were porting their applications to any other OS.

Well Windows had the largest market share, the largest installed user base, and if you didn't port to Windows, you weren't going to sell much software, but if you ported to Windows, you couldn't port to anything else without losing your MS support, an expensive proposition even if you want to do it, which makes it difficult to develop anything at all and make any money at it, and certainly no enterprise applications.

Thing is, there were other operating systems, including Linux, the main problem with them expanding their market share was a lack of robust or common business applications that limited their share of the OS market.

This constitutes a barrier to entry, pure an simple: by cornering the market on applications, they effectively cornered the market on on OS's, crowding out the open source OS's that third party developers, outside a few large enterprise level operations, depended on to maintain enough cash flow to keep programming.

A lot of firms require specialized software for example, boutique programming, databases and things like that specifically designed for their operations, but again, most of them were running Windows because their employees were already trained on MS Office suite applications (which is what they'll teach you in any college course in word processing - the application, MS Word), which means you need an MS programmer, who has to be a member of the MSDN, etc., etc.

It's a big deal, a few people went into developing boutique stuff for firms using Linux, the rest into web programming, and we all know how that turned out, leaving MS to fight the piracy that is the natural result of huge global demand for a monopolistically priced commodity.