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Gates: Say No to GPL, Yes to the Microsoft Ecosystem
Andy Tai writes "As part of Microsoft's campaign against the GPL, Bill Gates is personally coming to the front line to launch attacks. While speaking at the Government Leadership Conference, Gates argues against spending R&D dollars for GPLed software development. He suggests countries that look to adapt the GPL model are denying "the benefits of an eco-system that has worked extremely well in the United States" and they should copy the system in the US (where Microsoft has an monopoly). He further suggests that source code availability is not generally needed, and when it is needed, Microsoft provides it. Invoking words like "capitalism" and "innovation", Gates argues that free software can exist, but should be like a free unix called "VSB" (probably a transcription error for BSD), without the GPL around it. Gates continues: 'A government can fund research work on BFP, UNIX, and still have commercial companies in their country start off around that type of work. You know, technology policies like biotech -- you only -- if your universities are doing work that can be commercialized, you will have IT jobs in your country. And if they are not, then fine, just say that farming is your thing, or whatever it is. All the taxes will be paid by those guys or something -- I don't know. And the farmers will go home at night and work on the source code.' It is interesting to note that Microsoft is increasingly using the same "ecosystem" arguments for defending itself in the anti-trust trial and attacks on the GPL."
That's exactly the point. People, individual people, will take the software and work on it. For-profit corporations, for the most part, will not: their only income source from GPLed software is support (& other related services), and only some categories of software result in a viable income from support.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with people working on software; there's nothing wrong with objecting to something that you, as an individual, wrote being used to enrich a company's coffers. But this isn't individuals we're talking about; this is academia, where the lion's share of the world's research takes place. And in academia the standard procedure when something is discovered or created or whatever is to publish it and release it into the public domain. If some university researchers discover, say, a particularly absorbent compound, would they publish it but add the disclaimer that they will only allow it to be synthesized in individuals' basements and that it can't be used for any commercial products? Certainly not -- they would publish the result, and leave its applications open to all. Academic research is the foundation of most of any technology-related industry, and keeping industry away from the research will seriously harm the industry.
Most GPLed software is superior to closed source software
Yes, this is tangential, but, wow, is this slashdot dogma now? It's just so patently untrue... Yes, there are a few GPLed programs that are the best of their kind. But how many? It stands to reason that superior software would be, if not the most popular, at least quite popular. I can think of very few non-niche software categories dominated by GPL software, and all the ones I can think of are on the server side. (Even on the server side, I can think of more categories dominated by non-GPL open-source software than by GPL software -- see Apache and Perl, for example.) And if you want to see inferior GPL software, you need only browse sourceforge to see piles of crappy, semi-functional code (as well, of course, as some great software). This is not to criticize the GPL as a license for individually-developed software or to say that the GPL is shitty -- it's just that it's entirely blind not to recognize that GPLed software is still a minority of both software in general and quality software.