Bill Gates on sabotaging ACPI for Linux

Mon Jul 28 06:09:00 CDT 2008

From:    Bill Gates
Sent:    Sunday, January 24, 1999 8:41 AM
To:      Jeff Weslerinen, Ben Fathi
CC:      Carl Stork (Exchange); Nathan Myhrvold; > Eric Rudder
Subject: ACPI Extensions

One thing I find myself wondering about is whether we shouldn't try and make the "ACPI" extensions somehow Windows specific.

It seems unfortuante if we do this work and get our partners to do the work and the result is that Linux works great without having to do the work.

Maybe there is no way to avoid this problem but it does bother me.

Maybe we could define the APIs so that hey work well with NT and not the others even if they are open.

Or maybe we could patent something related to this.

Here is the e-mail from the Iowa case also see this thread in ubuntuforums In which more-manly-than-skelter Ryan finds the sabot in the BIOS, provides a fix and negotiates with Foxconn after suggesting Foxconn deliberately sabotaged their BIOS to destroy Linux ACPI.

I saw you targeting Linux with an intentionally broken ACPI table, you also have one for NT and ME, a separate one for newer NT variants like 2000, XP, Vista, and 2003/2008 Server, I'm sure that if you actually wrote to Intel ACPI specs instead of whatever quirks you can get away with for 8 versions of Windows and then go to the trouble of giving a botched table to Linux (How much is Microsoft paying you?) it would end up working a lot better, but I have this idea you don't want it to.