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Speaking at the Gartner Symposium in San Diego, California on Monday, Microsoft's Chairman and Chief Software Architect, Bill Gates outlined a change in the way Microsoft's products are built and work which will show up over the next few years - initially in the next release of Visual Studio. Gates defined it as 'visual modelling' and described it as 'expressing - without code - exactly what the steps are that need to take place'.

'It should be easy to sit down at the PC and navigate those processes and when something new comes along, say you have a new partnership with somebody, to just - without writing a line of code - describe how that affects the various things that go on,' Gates said. 'The heart and soul of this is to take what has required large amounts of code and say that a business analyst can do these things.'

When we put these ideas to Perens, author of The Open Source Definition, he responded: 'That was the goal of COBOL. And what we got was a lot of very bad code. Visual Basic has been similar. A visual organization doesn't make it possible for a non-programmer to write good software.'

However, Gates' vision seems to be to make it possible to do just this - and it's far more than a visual interface for coming up with a Word macro or Excel formula. 'You're essentially customizing - without writing code - the big engine underneath,' he said.

Still, says Perens, such a move would at least signal some forward thinking from Microsoft. 'If they are recognizing anything, it's that the customer doesn't necessarily feel comfortable with a one-size-fits-all solution. But it's so very far from Open

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Source. Open Source is about much more than
just the limited customisation options that MS wants to offer.'

But if successful, Microsoft may be able to use its modelling idea to actually make Linux look expensive. 'In terms of the idea that you're paying huge amounts of money for people to write glue code or you have to have an IT staff that's doing the hundredth reporting application... that work should be done visually. The tools should make that so that you're expressing those things in a way that a non-programmer can understand,' he said. 'The whole game here is to let people take high-volume, low-cost systems and use them for 90 percent of their needs.'

And this is precisely the area that Linux is finding a lot space to grow: print, file and web servers where companies find they can save a lot of money moving off expensive Unix and Sun boxes to cheap x86 systems running Linux.

And while Microsoft embraces and extends the benefits of customisation from Open Source software, Gates is expecting the Linux crew to be wholed up sorting out binary compatibility. 'A lot of what we do is compatibility. This is something - someday when the free software guys get an installed base, they will have to think about binary compatibility. That is they break it every new release they do. It's a very hard thing and yet it's super critical if you have an installed base,' he said.

Perens told us: 'Much of this is because MS did not start with a standard. And thus they have to support everything from DOS 1.0 on, and all of those operating systems were very ad-hoc in their APIs. In contrast, we started out with POSIX, and of course POSIX has been tested for many years and is more than just "stable". We have innovated in other areas like the GUI, and those will change but I don't think we will maintain compatibility more than a few versions back as time goes on.

'The Open Source software will of course be brought forward to new APIs as we change them. Commercial applications that have support will continue to work. If you have a "dusty deck", a commercial application that you can't get fixed, well that says more about proprietary software than Open Source. We're not promising to support it.'