Software Free

To pay so much attention to Bill Gates' retirement is missing the point. What really matters is not Gates, nor Microsoft, but the unethical system of restrictions that Microsoft, like many other software companies, imposes on its customers.

On Open Enterprise blog.

I think if Bill Gates met a Debian system and installed a program from the repositories, he might just go to his engineers and say, "Why can't it be like this?"

An analysis of how Microsoft controlled the British press and committees, using wealth

I have tremendous respect for what Bill and Melinda have chosen to do with the great wealth that Microsoft afforded. The Gates Foundation is tackling some huge challenges in global health with courage, innovation, and persistence, the same qualities which represented Microsoft at its best. But it doesn’t mean that the great Gates fortune was acquired in an entirely fair way or that Bill should be held up uncritically as a model of a successful businessman for doing so. To do so is to rewrite history and endorse a way of doing business which is harmful both to consumers and markets

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Pretty much my view, too.

Here's a frightening thought: Bill Gates is not so much giving up on his misguided closed-source approach to software as moving on to apply it to all the world's most pressing problems:

When Eric Schmidt left his job as the chairman and CEO of Novell to become the top executive at Google in 2001 he privately told journalist John Battelle that one of the things he was looking forward to was no longer competing with Microsoft.

Here's a piece about cloud computing that ask a pertinent question:

Why isn't the world's biggest and most powerful software company taking the initiative here? For all of Microsoft's chest beating about internet delivery as the next phase of its development, we've seen precious little in the way of action.

There are so many reasons that it's hard to pin down. Perhaps it's with Ray Ozzie, the successor to Bill Gates, who is still settling into his job. Or perhaps it's just the stifling bureaucracy of a corporation that stretches as far as the eye can see.

But there's also something missing from this analysis of cloud computing. Nowhere is it mentioned that an essential prerequisite for creating huge server farms to keep the clouds afloat is free software: if Google or Amazon had to use proprietary software, paying for each instance clouds would never, er, get off the ground.

"There's free software and then there’s open source," he suggested, noting that Microsoft gives away its software in developing countries. With open source software, on the other hand, "there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with."

Open source, he said, creates a license "so that nobody can ever improve the software," he claimed, bemoaning the squandered opportunity for jobs and business.

Spotted by the eagle-eyed Mike Masnick, who, for the sake of younger viewers, explains the obvious.

The Programmers Guild disputes that more H-1b visas would benefit "U.S. global competitiveness," and they would represent undue competition for Americans seeking jobs in this recessionary job market.

The 20th February 2008 was one of those 'Microsoft moments', when suddenly, the world changed. Just like when they 'got' the network (and we got NT), or they 'got' the Internet (and we got 'Internet Explorer'). This time they 'got' Open Source and Open Standards and the company is about to make another of their legendary radical transformations... or so they would [...]

It seems that Bill Gates' foundation is affected with the same love of monopolies and keeping things closed as its creator:

The chief of the malaria program at the World Health Organization has complained that the growing dominance of malaria research by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation risks stifling a diversity of views among scientists and wiping out the health agency's policy-making function.

In a memorandum, the chief of the malaria program, Arata Kochi, complained to his boss, Margaret Chan, the director general of WHO, that the foundation's money, while crucial, could have "far-reaching, largely unintended consequences."

Many of the world's leading malaria scientists are now "locked up in a 'cartel' with their own research funding being linked to those of others within the group," Kochi wrote. Because "each has a vested interest to safeguard the work of the others," he wrote, getting independent reviews of research proposals "is becoming increasingly difficult."

I hadn't heard of Microsoft's Unlimited Potential program, but Microsoft is using it to seed the Russian and adjacent markets with subscription-based PCs that customers can use. It's a clever way for Microsoft to seed developing markets with its Vista operating system, at a compelling price.

In the past week alone, Windows deals in Dubai, in Paris and even in Greece were announced not quite by Microsoft, but by Bill Gates, who had met politicians. We seem to recall press releases suggesting so — giving Gates all the credit. This was a not technical decision as much as a political one. Here is the latest news from Greece, which we have not covered yet (follow the links to find the rest).

"I think this is a question worth asking. Although this links to an article in French, you’ll probably get the idea: Bill Gates is visiting my beautiful city, Paris, just like many other well-known figures the U.S have brought to the world, such as Britney Spears, Georges W. Bush and Mr Potato. The major difference with them is that Bill Gates did not have to avoid mobs of curious people or fans (although I think Mr Potato managed to spend some time pretty much anonymously ).

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