Microsoft Has Tied the Valley's Hands by Bradley M. Kuhn Silicon Valley is locked into Microsoft. Microsoft (and a few other large proprietary software companies) control the secret standards, APIs, and file formats that now dominate industry and academia. Design documents, memos, manuals, and textbooks are formatted in Microsoft Word. Microsoft defines this so-called ".doc" file format, yet leaves it undocumented. This format changes with each release of Microsoft Word. New versions often generate files incompatible with old versions. Your business does not have the freedom to control the format of your documents. Suppose your accounting manager innocently upgrades to the new version of Microsoft Word. She sends out a memo that tells people how to report their hours. All the engineers still run the old version. They can't read her memo. The engineering department has to get a new site license for Microsoft Word just to read the accounting memos. Suppose your lead engineer devises a new way to organize your document archives. She writes a nifty program to do the job, but to work effectively, the program must read and manipulate the documents. No luck. The format is secret. No studying allowed. Forget that idea. This sort of problem isn't just internal. Eventually, companies share documents. Perhaps there are a few companies that do not use Microsoft software yet. However, if they want to work in the marketplace, they'll feel a tremendous pressure to install Microsoft software. The more companies that cave in, the harder it is to resist. Now you'll be hard pressed to find any Silicon Valley company that doesn't run Microsoft Word. It's not just file formats that Microsoft controls. Nearly every software company feels pressure to port to Microsoft platforms. Once you do, your engineers must conquer the mountains of Microsoft's proprietary software APIs. Your engineers nearly always must do so without access to source code. This means they don't have the freedom to fix the bugs that they find. Your engineers are stuck, left begging for bugfixes, as they write tedious work-arounds for those bugs they can't get fixed. Microsoft's ubiquitous control makes it easy to demonize them. In my community, it is particularly common to do so. But, to treat Microsoft as a Great Satan ignores the root of the problem. Microsoft is the most successful proprietary software company, and therefore most readily exhibits the problems that proprietary software brings. I urge the businesses of Silicon Valley to look hard at this example of control, and avoid it in the future. Silicon Valley business can't thrive with just one company, nor even a few companies. A healthy, competitive technological ecosystem thrives on many companies interacting and building interoperable, innovative technology. Freeing these companies to innovate is the only long term solution to locked-in control. Fortunately, that freedom is already available, and it has been 17 years in the making. Free Software systems, such as GNU/Linux systems, provide standards, APIs, and file formats that are unencumbered. Silicon Valley companies who adopt and create Free Software have the freedom to know the details of the file formats that store their documents. They have the freedom to examine the source code, and even change and improve the APIs when it suits them. Copylefted Free Software (such as software that uses the GNU General Public License) has an even greater advantage. It ensures that software will never be made proprietary out from under the companies that rely on it. Free Software offers the ability to understand the technology and build useful products with it, without the need for a Microsoft license. Every Free Software program comes with a copy of the source code that your engineers can examine and improve. File formats can't be secret when the source code that manipulates them is in plain sight. Free Software can feed a thriving software ecosystem. In the future, the place that Microsoft (and like-minded proprietary software companies) will hold in Silicon Valley is up to each of you. If you want a thriving, diverse industry, perhaps it's time to see what Free Software is out there to innovate around. Free Software gives the advantage to the smartest geeks and the most adept managers. Microsoft does not. Bradley M. Kuhn serves as Vice President of the Free Software Foundation, a Boston-based non-profit organization that stands for software freedom. Copyright (C) 2001 Bradley M. Kuhn Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article are permitted in any medium without royalty provide the copyright notice and this notice are preserved.