Bicycles, luxury cars... and tanks!

Bicycles, luxury cars... and tanks!

Posted Mar 10, 2003 20:19 UTC (Mon) by denials (subscriber, #3413)
Parent article: A look at the SCO complaint

If SCO is going to use an analogy of Linux as a bicycle and UNIX as a luxury car, they had better tread carefully: In 1999 Neal Stephenson developed a similar analogy in In the Beginning was the Command Line, a brief book available for free online that describes the differences in the product philosophies of operating system developers:

• Microsoft - originally producers of bicycles (MS-DOS), then mopeds (Windows 3.x), and finally ugly station wagons (Windows 95) and off-road vehicles (Windows NT)
• Apple - the real producer of luxury cars
• BeOS - creators of the Batmobile: stylish and super-powered
• Linux - tanks:

  These are not old-fashioned, cast-iron Soviet tanks; these are more like the M1 tanks of the U.S. Army, made of space-age materials and jammed with sophisticated technology from one end to the other. But they are better than Army tanks. They've been modified in such a way that they never, ever break down, are light and maneuverable enough to use on ordinary streets, and use no more fuel than a subcompact car. These tanks are being cranked out, on the spot, at a terrific pace, and a vast number of them are lined up along the edge of the road with keys in the ignition. Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free.

  Stephenson, Neal. In the Beginning was the Command Line. http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html. 1999.

Oddly enough, UNIX isn't even mentioned; I suppose Neal was talking about consumer-oriented operatin systems.

Clearly, however, by not citing Neal Stephenson's original intellectual property on the operating-system-as-vehicle analogy in their case against IBM, SCO has placed themselves in a precarious legal position.

Dan Scott

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