Bill Gates is known to be one of the richest people in the world. Along with Paul Allen, he founded and built the world’s largest software business, Microsoft, through supposed technological innovation, an analyzed business strategy, and aggressive business tactics.
In February 2014, Gates announced that he would step down as chairman of Microsoft to focus on charity work at his foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, making him perhaps the biggest philanthropist in the world.
There are different versions of the facts and several rumors that assure that Bill Gates, far from being a hero, was a person who exploited his employees, with acute neurosis and bad treatment towards people. Besides that, he allegedly built his technological empire based on the theft and plagiarism of ideas and projects developed by colleagues and friends who worked directly with the enemy company: Apple, led at that time by Steve Jobs.
What Were Bill Gates’ Alleged Thefts?
MS-DOS
In 1980, Gates licensed MS-DOS to IBM for use on the company’s first desktop PCs. However, Microsoft did not develop the operating system in-house; it acquired 86-DOS, originally called QDOS, an operating system created by Tim Paterson at Seattle Computer Co.
However, evidence points to the fact that the original version of Microsoft’s MS-DOS operating system contained code copied from an earlier operating system called CP/M. However, in a 2004 Business Week article, it was explained why IBM did not end up buying CP/M.
Gerry Davis, the attorney for Digital Research Inc (DRI), the company of Gary Kildall, creator of the first CP/M PC operating system, told Business Week that the company’s forensic investigators discovered that 86-DOS infringed on DRI’s intellectual property. But DRI never took legal action against Microsoft or IBM.
A man named Bob Zeidman decided to resolve the issue by examining the code in question using a set of tools he developed to detect copyright violations in software and published his findings in the pages of IEEE Spectrum. But it turns out that Zeidman had worked with Microsoft. Zeidman runs a company called Zeidman Consulting that, among other things, provides testing services and expert testimony for software-related intellectual property cases.
Zeidman says he examined the entire code base, which was not difficult to do because of the number of lines of code in the thousands, unlike modern applications, which have millions of lines of code, and says he found no evidence of copying. Zeidman also looked at the binary code of a fairly early version of MS-DOS and found nothing.
He noted in the article that binary analysis can easily miss copying because the code has been translated from its source code to binary, but he tells us that this is not so important in this case because if copying had occurred, it would have appeared in the Q-DOS source code.
Environment and Graphical Interfaces
This analysis deals only with the copied code, not the appearance of the operating system. In 2004, Little Brown published a book by Harold Evans entitled They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of Innovators, which included Kildall’s claims that the API and appearance of 86-DOS had been copied from CP/METRO.
In 2005, Paterson attempted to sue Evans and Little Brown for defamation, but the case was eventually dismissed as the judge found that Paterson had copied the API from CP/M. Given the recent ruling that APIs are not subject to copyright, it does not appear that DRI has had much luck in court, but it is difficult to dispute the similarities between the operating systems.
MS-DOS required users to type “C:>” type commands. Jobs and his team at Apple began working closely with Microsoft and were concerned that they would copy the Macintosh GUI and make their own version. Andy Hertzfeld, a member of the original Macintosh team, noticed that his contact at Microsoft was asking many detailed questions about how the Macintosh operating system worked.
Bill Gates knew that graphical interfaces were the future and that Microsoft had as much right as Apple to use the desktop idea, originally developed by the Xerox research center, not Apple. Jobs convinced Gates that Microsoft would not create graphics software for anyone else a year after the Macintosh debuted in January 1983.
Apple was a year late, however, and Gates, announced in November 1983, that Microsoft planned to develop a new operating system for IBM computers, called Windows, which incorporated a graphical interface with windows, icons, and a mouse for easy navigation.
Plagiarism, theft, or simple coincidence, Gates didn’t keep his promise to wait for Apple to launch their operating system, and that’ seems shady and suspicious.
This story was originally published in Spanish in Cultura Colectiva
