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Gates: Open Source Kills Jobs

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the snap!-snap! dept.

theodp writes "On the Malaysian leg of a whirlwind Asian tour, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates voiced his concerns over the growing goodwill towards open source, especially in Asia, emphasizing how damaging open source software can be. 'If you don't want to create jobs or intellectual property, then there is a tendency to develop open source. It is not something you do as a day job. If you want to give it away, you work on it at night,' he said. Gates, who apparently has never contended with the horrors of a VB upgrade, when on to say that '[Open source] doesn't guarantee upward compatibility.'"

2 of 976 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Gates is right by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 5, Informative
    Windows has a much better track on binary and source compatibility, my company still uses a DOS program of the '80s working under XP.

    Your '80s DOS program will probably run fine under Linux as well. In both cases, the 16-bit environment runs in a VM.

  2. Let's make an important distinction by e6003 · · Score: 5, Informative
    Gates says "If you don't want to create jobs or intellectual property..." (emphasis added). What kinds of intellectual property are there, and what might be affected by open source?

    - Copyrights: open source software is still copyrighted as much as closed source software. He can't be talking about this sort of intellectual property.

    - Patents: can also apply equally well to open or closed source software - indeed, some people call for software patents to explicitly include source code showing how the claimed "invention" is implemented.

    - Trademarks: not really relevant; they're concerned with brand names and don't depend on if one chooses to share the underlying source code to a program or not.

    - Trade secrets. Ah. We might be onto something here! Yes, something isn't a secret if you share it openly. Gee whizz - who'da thunk that?!

    Yes, what Gates is saying is that you can't have trade secrets if you have open source software - only that's far too obvious a statement to make and any audience would see straight through it. So he uses the meta-FUD term "intellectual property" instead. What a sham. As with the RIAA and MPAA, what Microsoft really needs is a law that forbids circumventing an "effective" business model...