Microsoft flexes more open-source muscle

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IBM Historical context

First, let?s deal with IBM:

http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/I/IBM.html
IBM: /I?B?M/
Once upon a time, the computer company most hackers loved to hate; today, the one they are most puzzled to find themselves liking.
From hackerdom's beginnings in the mid-1960s to the early 1990s, IBM was regarded with active loathing. Common expansions of the corporate name included: Inferior But Marketable; It's Better Manually; Insidious Black Magic; It's Been Malfunctioning; Incontinent Bowel Movement; and a near-infinite number of even less complimentary expansions (see also fear and loathing). What galled hackers about most IBM machines above the PC level wasn't so much that they were underpowered and overpriced (though that counted against them), but that the designs were incredibly archaic, crufty, and elephantine ... and you couldn't fix them ? source code was locked up tight, and programming tools were expensive, hard to find, and bletcherous to use once you had found them.
We didn't know how good we had it back then. In the 1980s IBM had its own troubles with Microsoft and lost its strategic way, receding from the hacker community's view. Then, in the 1990s, Microsoft became more noxious and omnipresent than IBM had ever been.
In the late 1990s IBM re-invented itself as a services company, began to release open-source software through its AlphaWorks group, and began shipping Linux systems and building ties to the Linux community. To the astonishment of all parties, IBM emerged as a staunch friend of the hacker community and open source development, with ironic consequences noted in the FUD entry.
This lexicon includes a number of entries attributed to ?IBM?; these derive from some rampantly unofficial jargon lists circulated within IBM's formerly beleaguered hacker underground.
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http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/O/open-source.html
open source: n.
[common; also adj. open-source] Term coined in March 1998 following the Mozilla release to describe software distributed in source under licenses guaranteeing anybody rights to freely use, modify, and redistribute, the code. The intent was to be able to sell the hackers' ways of doing software to industry and the mainstream by avoiding the negative connotations (to suits) of the term ?free software?. For discussion of the follow-on tactics and their consequences, see the Open Source Initiative site.
Five years after this term was invented, in 2003, it is worth noting the huge shift in assumptions it helped bring about, if only because the hacker culture's collective memory of what went before is in some ways blurring. Hackers have so completely refocused themselves around the idea and ideal of open source that we are beginning to forget that we used to do most of our work in closed-source environments. Until the late 1990s open source was a sporadic exception that usually had to live on top of a closed-source operating system and alongside closed-source tools; entire open-source environments like Linux and the *BSD systems didn't even exist in a usable form until around 1993 and weren't taken very seriously by anyone but a pioneering few until about five years later.
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Side note, I actually worked with some of this stuff back in ?96 in a BSD house, so?.

For those that where around then (how to tell that you are really old!), there was?
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http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/F/FUD.html
FUD: /fuhd/, n.
Defined by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to found his own company: ?FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering [Amdahl] products.? The idea, of course, was to persuade them to go with safe IBM gear rather than with competitors' equipment. This implicit coercion was traditionally accomplished by promising that Good Things would happen to people who stuck with IBM, but Dark Shadows loomed over the future of competitors' equipment or software. See IBM. After 1990 the term FUD was associated increasingly frequently with Microsoft, and has become generalized to refer to any kind of disinformation used as a competitive weapon.
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Just as a side note, this was composed on an triplebooted IBM laptop, mostly 'cuz other laptops just suck!

Posted by: B.O.F.H.   Posted on: 09/27/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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