
The Man Who Could Have Been Bill Gates (2004) - rms
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_43/b3905109_mz063.htm
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seldo
The triumph of DOS was the licensing, not the technology itself; that's what
made Bill Gates so rich. Even by contemporary standards MS-DOS was a half-
assed operating system full of design flaws.

Saying that Kildall made a much better operating system misses the point. The
operating system is not what made the money; Gates could have sold practically
any OS with his licensing deal and made the same fortune. He literally sold
the license before he even _owned_ DOS.

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mynameishere
Shit happens. Seriously, the guy was a big success by any measure, except the
measure that comes with comparing yourself with Bill Gates. No reason to hit
the bottle, if you ask me.

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rms
This is the full length-version of
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=624887>, which contains no different
information. It seems likely that the other story is copied from this Business
Week article without attribution for compilation among other short stories
about business for an ebook.

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wglb
An old article, but full of lessons.

What seems to be less often known about Kildall is that his thesis was about
writing optimizing compilers, and he is was the author of PL/M, a language
loosely based on XPL, a language designed as a tutorial for compiler
construction.

