I am no fan of Bill Gates, but to represent his opinion as "Linux makes interoperability harder" is to be guilty of the same FUD-mongering that Gates himself routinely engages in.
The original statement by Gates reads as follows:
Sometimes interoperability is also confused with open source software. Interoperability is about how different software systems work together. Open source is a methodology for licensing and/or developing software â that may or may not be interoperable. Additionally, the open source development approach encourages the creation of many permutations of the same type of software application, which could add implementation and testing overhead to interoperability efforts.
This statement on its own is absolutely correct. In fact, i would say it even more strongly: "open source development" will "add implementation and testing overhead". This is a simple logical process:
- Free software encourages multiple implementations.
- Multiple implementations require more effort to maintain than a single implementation.
- The most efficent situation would be a single implementation which operates perfectly with itself.
The difference between Microsoft and the Free Software community lies in the fact that we see multiple implementations as a good thing, whereas for Gates, every competing implementation is one more opportunity for people not to buy his implementation, and one more implementation with which his developers need to ensure interoperability. In Gates' ideal world, everyone would be using his implementation, and interoperability would be a lot less an issue.
I'm just glad that Gates isn't the one who determines what the rest of the world does.
