There’s a brouhaha about how motherboard maker Foxconn has tweaked its BIOS to not run Linux without a lot of tweaking. You can read about it here or at Slashdot here.
What I found interesting is a quote from Bill Gates about how he was mad that Linux was (and is) able to use ACPI found in computer BIOSes. He wrote in an email:
One thing I find myself wondering about is whether we shouldn’t try to make the “ACPI” extensions somehow Windows specific.
It seems unfortunate if we do this work and get our partners to do the work and the result is that Linux works great without having to do the work.
Maybe there is no way to avoid this problem but it does bother me.
Maybe we could define the API’s so that they work well with NT and not the others even if they are open.
And here’s the money quote:
Or maybe we could patent something related to this.
If that isn’t direct evidence that Gates and Microsoft are using patents to stop Linux, I don’t know what would be.
And before someone claims that Gates was merely protecting ACPI, it’s an open standard. In other words, it’s not his to protect.
“It seems unfortunate if we do this work and get our partners to do the work and the result is that Linux works great without having to do the work.”
It seems unfortunate that Gates believes that only M$ does any “work”. As if Linux sprang out of thin air. Hundreds of coders have worked on it! And they’ve had to work around plenty of problems and stumbling blocks designed into PCes, by Microsoft and its “partners”. If Gates’ biggest regret is that they couldn’t make APIs abstruse enough that only Windows could use them? Then apparently he’s never given a rat’s ass about improving OS performance. He’s still conceiving of PC software as a means of monopolization, and NOT INNOVATION!
If world governments could be pressed to declare Personal Computing devices as a public resource (or something). So it can’t be proprietarily designed to exclude out users’ choices in software and use. Then a lot of this nonsense would cease. At what point do we stop treating the PC as a luxury item? That’s perfecting Ok for some monopoly to control it use? This collusion between Microsoft and chip makers, should be under US Government (if not International) scrutiny, at all times. The patent laws do not exist in order that patents should grow, multiple, and consume, like a cancer! I guess Gates considers himself the John D. Rockefeller of PCes. Developing his own “PC Trust”. I wonder how long before our anti-trust laws are updated and enforced again?