底下是從 http://archive.org 撈回來的資料,現在該頁已經沒內容了。(話說 gcin 0.1.0 tarball 也是從 archive.org 撈回來的)
http://web.archive.org/web/20000303115338/www.linux-mag.com/1999-11/joy_01.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20000303140524/www.linux-mag.com/1999-11/joy_02.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20000302085516/www.linux-mag.com/1999-11/joy_03.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20000303182148/www.linux-mag.com/1999-11/joy_04.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20000414193525/www.linux-mag.com/1999-11/joy_05.html
關於 vi 發展背景是 joy_04.html 那一頁。
以下轉貼全文:
 FEATURES 
 The Joy of Unix 
Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy charts where Linux and free software fit into his company's solar system.
by  Eugene Eric Kim 
	
	
	As one of the creators of Berkeley Unix, Bill Joy
	knows a thing or two about developing and marketing a free operating
	system. Sun Microsystems' chief scientist has survived the Unix wars
	and has watched both his company and its chief competitor, Microsoft,
	grow from tiny start-ups to industry giants. Though he has had a major
	hand in the development of such important Unix technologies as NFS
	(Sun's Network File System), the Berkeley Unix TCP/IP stack, and the vi
	text editor, Joy's current obsession is trying to build a thriving
	development community around Sun's Jini distributed computing
	technology and its not-quite-Open Source software licensing model. Joy
	recently accepted Linux Magazine's invitation to dinner, where
	he gave Publisher Adam Goodman, Executive Editor Robert McMillan, and
	Associate Editor Eugene Kim the lowdown on what Sun thinks of Linux and
	Open Source.
	
	
	Linux Magazine: One of the reasons we wanted to
	talk to you was that you have a long history with and a broad
	perspective on Unix and free software. What do you think of Linux? A
	lot of people talk about it as more than just an operating system.
	
	
	Bill
	Joy: It's actually less. It's just a kernel if you want to be technical
	about it. It's politically incorrect to conflate Linux with the
	applications. At least one person will get upset. So to be quite
	precise, it's just the kernel of the OS. When we did Berkeley Unix, we
	were doing the operating system and all of the applications.
	
	
	In
	a lot of ways, the Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD) was on the road
	to being free with source available and many of the things that Linux
	is. But it got hung up in this legal fight between the University of
	California and Unix Systems Labs.
	
	
	Those are the accidents of
	history. Now with Linux, we have this new version of Unix written with
	similar kinds of values that BSD had. One of the great strengths of
	Unix is that it's been rewritten and reimplemented several times.
	Applications with similar names and similar functions are widely
	understood, which allows this healthy kind of invention and reinvention
	to occur.
	
	
	LM: So if it weren't for the lawyers, we'd be called FreeBSD Magazine?
	
	
	BJ:
	If BSD had been free, there would have been no reason to rewrite it.
	The new thing that happened with Linux was cultural. The Internet is
	now coupling people together in ways that probably couldn't have
	happened before. How else would the developers have found each other?
	
	
	I
	did my work in the era of the magnetic tape. We sent Unix in source
	form to thousands of people; they sent us a few hundred dollars,
	because I had to pay for the postage and for the printing of the
	manuals, and that was our network. It was a postal-age speed thing. It
	was not very convenient.
	
	
	LM:Were licensing issues as important back then as they seem to be now?
	
	
	BJ:
	No. I knew I needed a license for BSD because at some point Berkeley
	was going to discover it. So I just took a license from the University
	of Toronto and modified it a little bit and started using that. I
	figured if I sent people a tape, and there was nothing for them to
	sign, they wouldn't take it seriously.
	
	
	When you give things
	away for free, often people think that's what it's worth: Nothing. So
	charging them a small amount and giving them a license to sign actually
	created a perception of value. I'm not saying the tape didn't have
	value, but an awful lot of stuff comes across your desk that you just
	throw away.
	
	
	LM: So, what did your license actually say?
	
	
	BJ:
	I don't remember. It was a one-page thing. I didn't have any lawyers
	look at it and I'm not a lawyer. I just made it up as I went along. 
	
	
	What
	happened was that at some point we were getting to be big enough that
	we were sending out hundreds of these [Unix tapes] a year and charging
	hundreds of dollars for them. A quarter of a million dollars in revenue
	is a great deal of money for a graduate student. Scott McNealy likes to
	say: "To ask permission is to seek denial." And we were operating with
	that philosophy. 
	
	
	But there were huge amounts of money
	involved and we were becoming pretty visible. So eventually we decided
	to send AT&T a letter asking them: "Is this okay what we're doing?"
	And 18 months later they sent a letter back: "We take no position." We
	won't answer your question. So that's what it was like to deal with a
	regulated monopoly of lawyers. That same sort of legal structure is
	what caused [AT&T] to license the transistor for nothing.
	
	
	So
	we couldn't actually get an answer from them and it was only years
	later that this whole fracas erupted around who owns the code. It
	turned out their code was as tainted with Berkeley stuff as ours was
	with theirs, so they eventually came to a truce. That's what I've heard
	second hand or just drinking wine with people. So there's a very
	tortured and funny history to all this code.
	
	
	LM: Have you
	ever contemplated what it would have been like if you'd released your
	code under the GNU Public License (GPL) or something similar?
	
	
	BJ:
	I don't see what the advantage to it is. The important thing is that
	people have the source code. I actually think it's fine that people can
	take BSD and make improvements to it and reap software profit.
	
	
	I
	don't think, given where we were and what we were trying to do, that
	the license made that much of a difference. At Berkeley, we had the
	model that software is the result of your research. The university
	tradition is that when you do research, you publish. So not giving
	people the source code for software meant that you weren't publishing
	your research. A fundamental model of BSD was: Software is a result of
	our research. We'll publish it and other people will use it if they
	choose. If someone commercializes it, I don't particularly care,
	because if you publish research in a university, people can
	commercialize it. That's just the way it is.
	
	
	The important
	thing in my mind is that people share stuff. We've done something at
	Sun -- Community Source Licensing -- which is another spin on this. But
	the fundamental principle in my mind is that people get to see the
	results of other people's work in a way that they can stand on
	shoulders rather than on toes. The details can vary; there can be many
	approaches and they work in different contexts.
	
	
	I think the
	GPL is fine. I just don't necessarily agree that it will achieve
	everything that Richard Stallman thinks it will. I'm not as religious
	about this as other people are.
	
	
	
	LM: Just what was your involvement with Sun's Community Source License?
	
	
	BJ: I was the instigator of it.
	
	
	LM: Did you at any point evaluate the GPL for Sun's projects?
	
	
	BJ:
	I can't license all of Sun's intellectual property under the GPL,
	because it just won't work. I don't see any reason why I should give
	somebody who's doing commercial reuse unfettered access to stuff that
	cost me millions of dollars to do. We're spending over a billion
	dollars a year in research. I can't just throw it all on the street.
	Not only because it's worth something, but because I'm not convinced
	people will respect its values -- the values I would want to see
	expressed in the way people used it.
	
	
	If I make code available
	under the GPL, I'll lose control of it. The Europeans have this notion
	of artistic rights, and it seems to me an artist -- the person who
	creates something -- has some right over the ultimate use of what they
	do. Artists' rights also allow an artist to get paid on resale of their
	stuff later. My view is that programmers are like artists. I think
	there's got to be some economic reward back to the people who do the
	creative work that turns out to matter.
	
	
	The GPL just doesn't
	solve my business problem at Sun. I would like all of our intellectual
	property to be available in source form, but I can't economically do
	that under the GPL.
	
	
	In the object-oriented world [of
	programming], binaries are almost as usable as source because they have
	clean interfaces and boundaries. This whole thing about open source
	makes much less sense once you start talking about [object-oriented
	programming languages like] Java, except to the extent that people
	don't get the boundaries right.
	
	
	LM: What about your original
	implementation of TCP/IP for BSD, which was freely available and which
	became the basis for a lot of the other implementations that are out
	there? It seems that from a compatibility standpoint, Java, for
	example, would have benefited from freely available source code in the
	same way TCP/IP did.
	
	
	BJ: The top predator now is Microsoft.
	We didn't have a top predator back when I did TCP/IP. When you have a
	person with unlimited funds who is clearly focused on destroying the
	value proposition of what you're doing, you'd be a fool not to account
	for them in the strategy that you adopted.
	
	
	LM: Do you feel that Microsoft might actually try to create Microsoft Linux in an attempt to fragment the Linux community?
	
	
	BJ:
	The enemy in terms of fragmentation is usually yourself -- the people
	who know the most about making the software better. It's likely to be
	two separate groups that both decide that they're right and they're
	both going to make it better and just diverge. You've seen the history
	of the family tree of Unix. It's all over the map. It's certain to
	happen to the Linux tree at some point.
	
	
	LM: Then why hasn't it happened already?
	
	
	BJ:
	It has. Depending on what we'd say Linux is -- the kernel hasn't
	fragmented, but the distributions have. People's systems aren't the
	same.
	
	
	LM: Do you think that the GPL discourages incompatibility by requiring people to make their source code freely available?
	
	
	BJ:
	I don't see that it really prevents incompatibility. The only thing I
	know that prevents incompatibility is requiring people to be
	compatible. The GPL permits compatibility. It does not encourage it.
	
	
	LM: Can you explain Sun's position toward Linux on Sparc? Sun seems to be supporting the development effort somewhat.
	
	
	BJ:
	Right. Well, the customer's always right. If the customer wants Linux,
	that's great -- then we should give it to them. Sparc is the hardware
	that we make, and we're supportive of and very glad that people in the
	Linux community have done the hard work that they need to do.
	
	
	We
	treat each of our divisions as entirely separate businesses, and I
	don't necessarily know what's going to be important in the long run.
	People have now figured out that companies that are a little more
	chaotic in this way actually are better adapters to environmental
	changes, and I think it's one of the reasons Sun has done so well. We
	don't try to get everybody signed up to one credo. We do not have one
	ironclad set of rules. We allow this kind of diversity internally.
	
	
	LM: Sun is providing machines for Linux developers. What else is it doing to support Linux?
	
	
	BJ:
	I don't actually know. I'm more involved in Java and Jini. The
	company's very large -- we have like 30,000 people -- and I probably
	get involved with about half of the R&D. The Solaris stuff I have
	the least to do with.
	
	
	Sun wins if somebody has a Linux machine
	with Java because that improves the Java community. Sun wins if it's a
	Sparc. That's even better. To be honest, if it was Solaris, Sparc, and
	Java, that would be even better. But we're not infinitely greedy here.
	
	
	The
	old Macy's model was if they didn't have what you wanted, they'd send
	you to the store that did, even if it was a competitor. If you come to
	us, we don't expect that we're going to solve all of your problems. You
	may want Apache on Linux on x86, and we'll do the best to operate in
	that environment because there may be some reason that's beyond our
	ability to affect that that's the right answer for you.
	
	
	So to
	be customer-driven is to accept that and to contribute what you can. We
	just did this big deal with Apache to put more Java stuff in Apache. So
	we're coming at it from all directions.
	
	
	LM: You're referring to the Jakarta project, where
	Sun agreed to donate its JavaServer Pages (JSP) and other Java Web
	server-related source code to the Apache project and have it released
	under the Apache license.
	
	
	BJ:  That was a local business decision; I'm glad that they did that.
	
	
	LM: But you still have the same concerns about standardization, compatibility, and so forth?
	
	
	BJ:
	Which I think the Apache community should have also. To the extent that
	Apache is a platform, and you want to have it be a healthy platform,
	you want the platform to be stable. But, I'm not opposed to limited
	cases depending on other licensing mechanisms.
	
	
	I would always
	rather have a legal thing to fall back on to enforce compatibility.
	Think of contractual enforcement as sort of the right-wing approach,
	and community licensing as more left-wing. We've taken a step to the
	center. We expect in most cases the community to enforce compatibility,
	but in the limited case of a rogue, I want the ability to enforce a
	legal contract, because I don't see any reason why I shouldn't have
	that ability. In the left wing, amongst ourselves, we can argue about
	these things, but in reality, most of the commercial guys are so far to
	the right that we already seem radical by being in the middle.
	
	
	It's
	innovation and sharing versus centralized control. It's basically the
	Romans versus the Greeks. That's what it comes down to. Microsoft is
	the Roman model, and the other people are basically the Greek model.
	That's the real root of it.
	
	
	LM: Isn't that the same situation with Java? With Jini?
	
	
	BJ:
	No. Because the Java source code has always been widely available.
	That's never been the issue. You can download it yourself. Even under
	the old license, we basically had a clickable license to download all
	this stuff.
	
	
	Basically, we think that it's much better to work
	together than to not work together. That's not a very complicated
	value. Microsoft thinks: "anything you do, you compete with us." I
	think that if you don't necessarily like what we do, we'll find some
	other way to work together. There are not enough of us IT professionals
	anyway.
	
	
	LM: Speaking of Microsoft, have you ever meet Bill Gates?
	
	
	BJ: Oh yeah. Mostly in the eighties. I met him in the early 1980s.
	
	
	LM: So would you consider him someone you know fairly well personally?
	
	
	BJ:  No. That would be a stale evaluation of him.
	
	
	LM: So you believe he's changed?
	
	
	BJ:  I believe it's possible that he has so I can't speak to his current state. 
	I haven't seen him since -- the last time I talked to him was probably five years ago. 
	
	
	LM: Is Linux the major force pushing against Microsoft?
	
	
	BJ:
	I think Java is probably the major force pushing against Microsoft
	right now. I think Linux is a threat but Java's a bigger threat.
	
	
	LM: Do you see Linux as a threat to Sun at all?
	
	
	BJ:
	No. More Unix is better. Anything that isn't Microsoft is better.
	Anybody who buys a Linux machine has a lot better chance of buying a
	Solaris machine as their next machine or buying a Sparc machine running
	Linux or buying Java. The probabilities are greater for all those cases.
	
	
	If
	I look at the graph of what percentage of customer dollars I'm likely
	to get next, it's much higher if they start with Linux than if they
	start with Windows. So in all cases, I'd rather win and get
	Sparc/Solaris/Java as the solution. But Linux/Sparc/Java would be my
	second choice.
	
	
	LM: Do you know of a company named VA Linux Systems?
	
	
	BJ:  I met somebody who said they were working for them. I don't track the Linux community, though.
	
	
	LM: What do you think about the business models being built around Linux?
	
	
	BJ:
	I understand that people think they're going to build a business on the
	service model, but the truth is customers don't want to pay for that,
	so I don't get it. I don't know how it's going to work. People don't
	like to pay for service.
	
	
	The whole proposition with Linux is
	that nobody can control the operating system. Some invisible hand
	controls it; a community controls it. Any individual company can't
	affect where it goes. How is everybody going to use this in a sense?
	The Linux companies are hobbled by it because if you say they can add
	value, then I say it's going to fragment Linux.
	
	
	If you accept
	the proposition that they can't fragment it, then you also are saying
	that they can't really differentiate themselves. Because other than
	tuning it up a little bit, to differentiate would cause fragmentation. 
	
	
	I
	would argue that for most people the performance is going to be more
	than they're going to need anyway. I'm not sure performance
	differentiation is going to be that significant. So I'm not exactly
	sure how these companies will differentiate themselves technically.
	
	
	LM: Have you ever considered making the Solaris source code more freely accessible?
	
	
	BJ:
	Yeah. The difficulty is that it's got a lot of third-party stuff that's
	licensed under funny terms. So I think it will be really healthy for
	both the Solaris and Linux communities to work more closely together.
	
	
	LM: Think that will ever happen?
	
	
	BJ:
	It already is. We run a lot of Linux binaries, and we're trying to find
	ways to work together. Merging isn't a goal. I think Linux and Solaris
	have different goals. Linux is not worried about providing MVS class or
	VM370 or whatever IBM-class services for corporate data centers. That's
	not the center of the Linux community.
	
	
	LM: But there are certainly areas of overlap.
	
	
	BJ:
	That's okay. It gives people a choice, and that's not a bad thing,
	right? I still prefer to win. I'm not saying we're not competitive, but
	I'd still rather have it be Linux than NT. If there's two Unix choices
	and one Microsoft, that improves our chances.
	
	
	LM: Do you think it's likely that parts of the Solaris operating system will be individually released as open source software?
	
	
	BJ:
	I think that would be a good thing. There are logistic issues. You have
	to spend money to do that and it's hard work. In return, you get the
	value that the source code's available so the customer can become more
	self-reliant. I think self-reliance is a good thing.
	
	
	LM: Were you in favor of Sun's decision to move to AT&T Unix with Solaris?
	
	
	BJ:
	It was hard to do a deal with AT&T and it was hard to work with
	them. It was a very close call and I went into Scott's office and I
	said to him: This is a really close call and I can make the deal happen
	if you want. There are pluses and minuses. Personally I think it's a
	plus because I think a unified Unix community is better than one that's
	not, and I'm concerned about this. But I also think it would be okay if
	we decide to go our own way. It's your call. It's a CEO call.
	
	
	LM:
	Do you see similarities between the development community and the
	cultural community that's surrounding Linux right now and the community
	that surrounded BSD when you were developing it?
	
	
	BJ: No. Our
	community was so small. It was Robert Elz and the people at Berkeley
	and the people at Bell Labs. There was one guy in Austria and one in
	Australia. No one else contributed much of substance that I recall.
	
	
	LM: Do you believe that the BSD guys in general have a different philosophy toward software development then the Linux guys do?
	
	
	BJ:
	No. I think that if you exclude device drivers, you'd find that there's
	a bit of a myth operating here; that a whole lot of people wrote the
	system. It was actually a small number of people.
	
	
	LM: In BSD or in Linux?
	
	
	BJ:
	Both cases. We have this myth that distributed development works, but
	it's a slight bit of a lie in that a small number of bright people can
	create an operating system. It does take a lot of people to write all
	of the device drivers. That's true. But that doesn't necessarily mean
	we can coordinate the programming of hundreds of people writing C code.
	I don't know if that's true or not, and I personally don't think Linux
	proves it. I don't think Apache proves that. That's the myth that
	people have propagated. Maybe it's true, but if you called me as an
	expert witness, I would testify that it has not been true in my
	experience.
	
	
	LM: Is there something to the notion that the people working on BSD are more exclusive than the Linux community?
	
	
	BJ:
	That's an us-versus-them thing.These things just get amplified. I don't
	think these people vary from each other by much. They just identify
	with some group, and that's a human-nature thing.
	
	
	BSD is
	older. It doesn't need as much hacking. So if you're a new person
	learning how to hack, BSD was not as good a place to go. It didn't need
	as much work. Linux grew up with the Internet. By the time the Net came
	along, BSD didn't need the same level of work and wasn't as amenable to
	getting people interested in it.
	
	
	When you already have several
	million lines of code, it's not as much fun to work on. Linux was a
	great thing because it allowed a lot of people to get involved in
	learning about operating systems by helping to finish this system. That
	process of creating something is the process of creating a community.
	
	
	So
	Linux came along at the great, perfect time in a perfect, incomplete
	state for lots of people to participate in. It was still small enough
	that people could read the code. On the other hand, BSD was already
	mature, and the things that needed to be done to it were hard enough
	that it made it difficult for any person to come and participate.
	
	
	So
	BSD wasn't as amenable to parallel innovation because the bar to
	participating was pretty high and the code base was too large. When I
	started on Unix, the source code could be listed in ten or twenty
	thousand lines as a 50-page or 100-page book.
	
	
	If I came in
	today and wanted to do something with Solaris, I'd be overwhelmed. I
	can't have the kind of impact I had on Unix with Solaris. The
	second-generation people coming into the Linux community are going to
	have the same problem.
	
	
	LM:: What inspired you to write vi?
	
	
	BJ:
	What happened is that Ken Thompson came to Berkeley and brought this
	broken Pascal system, and we got this summer job to fix it. While we
	were fixing it, we got frustrated with the editor we were using which
	was named ed. ed is certainly frustrating.
	
	
	We got this code from a guy named George Coulouris at University College in London called em -- Editor for Mortals -- since only immortals could use ed
	to do anything. By the way, before that summer, we could only type in
	uppercase. That summer we got lowercase ROMs for our terminals. It was
	really exciting to finally use lowercase.
	
	
	LM: What year was that?
	
	
	BJ: '76 or '77. It was the summer Carter was president. So we modified em and created en. I don't know if there was an eo or an ep but finally there was ex. [laughter] I remember en but I don't know how it got to ex.
	So I had a terminal at home and a 300 baud modem so the cursor could
	move around and I just stayed up all night for a few months and wrote vi.
	
	
	LM: So you didn't really write vi in one weekend like everybody says?
	
	
	BJ:
	No. It took a long time. It was really hard to do because you've got to
	remember that I was trying to make it usable over a 300 baud modem.
	That's also the reason you have all these funny commands. It just
	barely worked to use a screen editor over a modem. It was just barely
	fast enough. A 1200 baud modem was an upgrade. 1200 baud now is pretty
	slow.
	
	
	9600 baud is faster than you can read. 1200 baud is way
	slower. So the editor was optimized so that you could edit and feel
	productive when it was painting slower than you could think. Now that
	computers are so much faster than you can think, nobody understands
	this anymore.
	
	
	The people doing Emacs were sitting in labs at
	MIT with what were essentially fibre-channel links to the host, in
	contemporary terms. They were working on a PDP-10, which was a huge
	machine by comparison, with infinitely fast screens.
	
	
	So they could have funny commands with the screen shimmering and all that, and meanwhile, I'm 
	sitting at home in sort of World War II surplus housing at Berkeley with 
	a modem and a terminal that can just barely get the cursor off the bottom line.
	
	
	It was a world that is now extinct.  People don't know that vi
	was written for a world that doesn't exist anymore -- unless you decide
	to get a satellite phone and use it to connect to the Net at 2400 baud,
	in which case you'll realize that the Net is not usable at 2400 baud.
	It used to be perfectly usable at 1200 baud. But these days you can't
	use the Web at 2400 baud because the ads are 24 kilobytes.
	
	
	LM: Do you still use vi?
	
	
	BJ: No, because I mostly use Netscape.
	
	
	LM: To write code?
	
	
	BJ: I mostly do e-mail. The last code I wrote of any substance, I wrote in vi.
	
	
	LM:
	Did you have a sense back in those days -- even in the furthest region
	of your mind -- that you were working on something that would
	eventually build an industry or change the world?
	
	
	BJ:No.
	
	
	LM: At what point did it occur to you? At what point did you look around and say: Whoa?
	
	
	BJ: I probably constantly under-estimated it.
	
	
	LM: You must have realized that it was happening at some point in your career.
	
	
	BJ: I think the Web was a "wow" for me because my dad was using it. [laughter]
	
	
	LM: You said earlier that Sun would like to work more
	with the Linux community. Do you have any thoughts on how something
	like that might happen?
	
	
	BJ: We have Linux mode on Solaris and
	there's Solaris mode on Linux. We've done analysis on both sets of APIs
	and what commonality they have. If the Linux community believes it's
	okay for there to be other choices, then that's kind of a prerequisite
	to working with somebody who's different. It's okay that there's
	another version of Unix out there and total world domination is not our
	goal.
	
	
	LM: Are there opportunities to do things with Linux
	that Sun was never able to do as a company? For example, Unix never got
	the desktop. Or at least, Sun was never really able to bring Unix to
	the desktop.
	
	
	BJ: That was our whole business for years.
	
	
	LM:
	Right, but Microsoft owns the desktop right now. It's not meant as a
	cut against Sun. It's just a fact that Unix is basically a server
	operating system.
	
	
	BJ: We haven't given up. We're doing Java clients now.
	
	
	LM: Why do you think that Unix was never successful on the desktop?
	
	
	BJ:
	Because Microsoft had a person who was very greedy and who was very
	brutal in his business dealings and was handed a monopoly by IBM due to
	ineptness. They had several opportunities to rein this guy in and the
	management blew it. So the IBM monopoly got transferred basically due
	to blunders. Microsoft is a direct successor to the IBM mainframe
	monopoly. The corporate guys coalesced around the PC standard because
	it came from IBM. Not because it was any good.
	
	
	LM: But does
	something like Linux offer Sun an opportunity to rectify past mistakes?
	For example, there are windowing systems being developed for Linux that
	need ...
	
	
	BJ: We've had windowing systems, several of them,
	for many years. The presence or absence of a windowing system didn't
	win or lose the war. We have had CDE and Open Windows and X-Windows and
	NeWS.
	
	
	We've had applications too. We've had all of these
	things. I suggest that the desktop war was not won based on technical
	merit, but on business decisions. Microsoft came along and took over
	the apps base with Office. Office locked people in to the point where
	corporation don't feel they can change their desktops, not because
	they're locked to Windows but to Microsoft Office.
	
	
	Now what's
	happening is the wind is blowing hard for the companies to put
	everything on the Net. Make the browser the access point for the
	desktops. So the desktop is really becoming a browser. But the people
	-- the companies -- still have these Microsoft Office hairballs that
	nobody likes. Have you seen a good review of Office 2000? Everybody
	hates it. But Office is what locks up the desktop.
	
	
	LM: There is a lot of talk about Linux possibly conquering the desktop.
	
	
	BJ:
	It's easier to talk about than to do. The Macintosh is easy to use, and
	it even has Office. What's the difference between Linux and a
	Macintosh? If Linux with future apps is going to be good enough, why
	aren't more people buying Macs?
	
	
	LM: You think this is a fight that's already been fought, basically?
	
	
	BJ:
	No, I'm not saying you can't find a way to win. It's just that I
	haven't heard what it is. Given a sufficient number of people who care
	and an ability to be flexible about the way you achieve your objective,
	Linux might get there. You have to find a way around some of these
	things that are preventing people from switching.
	
	
	These guys
	at Microsoft are very aggressive business people, and they have been
	very successful as aggressive business people. I don't think they've
	been very successful at building good products. I think history will
	judge their products to be the lowest-quality consumer products ever
	built and manufactured in any scale.
	
	
	It's similar to how
	Detroit got itself to where they manufactured incredibly low-quality
	cars, which coincided in history with GM's maximum market share. What
	happens is monopolists don't tend to value product quality. Very high
	market share is what they value.
	
	
	As GM's market share was
	declining, it always talked about getting back market share. Why didn't
	they talk about making products that people wanted to buy that were
	high quality? That was the problem. I heard Steve Ballmer [President of
	Microsoft]say this in a speech: "Our number one goal is maximizing our
	market share." Excuse me. Market share should be a consequence of your
	goal. That can't be the goal.
	
	
	The goal is to build great
	products. I have an infinite respect for Steve Jobs because whatever
	else you say about him, his passion is to build a great product. Good
	things come from that. Bad things come from a focus on market share. So
	the Linux community should have as its goal to build the greatest
	operating system. Its goal should not be, "Beat Microsoft." Because
	that's a market-share goal. That's a very, very destructive,
	counterproductive goal.
	
	
	LM: Do you think there are any other goals the Linux community should pursue?
	
	
	BJ:
	Make it the best product it can be. Figure out who you want it to be
	for and build it to serve that community -- if it's for yourself,
	that's okay. Make it the best hobbyist -- in the best sense of the word
	-- operating system. Linux to me is like amateur radio was to radio.
	Amateur radio developed all the radio technology. Linux is developing
	some good technology, and these people are hobbyists. Probably some
	Latin root of the word "hobbyist" means people who love something and
	care about it. So it's a sense of love and caring for reasons that are
	noneconomic.
	
	
	It's like amateur astronomers. In essence, it's
	amateur in the highest sense of the word, having the highest affinity
	to caring that it's always the best. And tinkering and all this kind of
	stuff, that's a very positive value. 
	
	
	
	Eugene Eric Kim writes, programs, and consults on a freelance basis. He is the author of CGI Developer's Guide(Sams.net 1996), and is currently writing a book on the history of free software. He can be reached at eekim@eekim.com.
	
