Gates: 'Linux makes interoperability harder'

Bill Gates has sent an email to all Microsoft's corporate customers warning that those in search of technological interoperability shouldn't look towards open source software.

Interoperability, Gates wrote, should be in every firm's thinking: "Businesses face an ongoing challenge of making a wide variety of software from many different vendors work together... Bringing heterogeneous technologies together while reducing costs is today a challenge that touches every part of the organisation," he said in the email.

Gates adds that he believes that the key to getting everything to work together, and the easiest approach for developers, is interoperability.

"Interoperability is more pragmatic than many other approaches, such as attempting to make all systems compatible at the code level, focusing solely on adding new layers of middleware that try to makes all systems look and act the same, or seeking to make different systems interchangeable," the email says.

While acknowledging through the interoperability drive that there are many more vendors than Microsoft in the market, the Microsoft head honcho doesn't miss the opportunity to stick the knife into arch rival Linux.

"Open source is a methodology for licensing and/or developing software - 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," Gates wrote.