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Gates Nose-Dives at CES
Lots of submissions this morning about Bill Gates' performance at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show. His Media Center PC presentation crashed. (The presentation is online.) He also gave an interview to CNET, where he described anyone who doesn't support ever-increasing intellectual property laws as "communists". Boingboing has some commentary on that interview as well.
We'd be supporting the idea of the government owning all intellectual property.
However, not to defend Mr. Gates (and surely to piss off a lot of the OSS community), but there is some small degree of validity to his statement, though he used the wrong word.
Many people who completely reject the idea of intellectual property (not all) aren't really communists as Mr. Gates would propose, but in fact, radical left-wing anarchists. They despise authority in any form that it comes in; that is why such things as IP and copyrights are hated so much. The idea of God introduces a supreme authority, so they hate him even more.
They wear the "communist" label with pride, not understanding who they really are, or what communism really is and what it has done to nearly every single society that has been foolish enough to try it.
They are the modern day hippy, when it comes right down to it. They stand for and oppose the same things and the same principles.
But God demonstrates his love for us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us - (Romans 5:8)
He has to say this sort of thing since he's bet the MS farm on DRM and the like. When you hear people making these kind of references though, you know they are concerned. That tells me the DRM plan isn't going as well as they thought it would.
Have you seen Ironstayn vs Supergovernment yet?
and was surprised, at first, to find that many people there actually believed that.
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"Communism is a method of government"
... gasp ... socialism it is a nearly inevitable evolution of Capitalism that eventually you end up with one company that owns everything, and in the computer age it would most likely be Microsoft unless they screw the pooch at some point.
Actually Communism is a way of living. It derives from living in a commune. You might note it has the same root as a word us Linux people use a lot, community. Bill Gates is in fact right, sharing MP3's and open source software development IS communism. The catch is thanks the word was hijacked by a bunch of socialist dictators, specially Stalin. Its been turned in to a dirty word and thats why Bill Gates and Co. try to lay it on file swappers and Linux. Americans in particular freak at the word and start warming up the jets on the deck of the aircraft carriers everytime the get a wiff of it in the air. That is exactly what Bill is trying to do here, mobilize the American people and government in to a reactionary frenzy in which they wipe out file sharing and Linux. Oh, and in the process he just happens to get "Trusted Computing" and he locks Linux off of the Internet and out of personal computing because it can't be "Trusted". In the process he further secures his monopoly because all computers have to be trusted and Microsoft will seek to control the implementation of that trust(in all hardware and all software). It is classic Marxism, the community versus an ever expending capitalist monpolist.
At its ideal Communism is a group of people living together sharing their resources and labor, working together for the common good. They are not dividing the world up in to personal property which at its worst usually means one percent of the people own everything, including all the land and everyone else is dirt poor and share cropping or working in outright servitude. Thats what Russia was like prior to 1917 which is why there was a revolution. Its also classic Marxism that when you have capital you have a huge advantage in making more capital over people who have no capital. And of course there is a near inevitable concentration of wealth in a few hands and ever larger monpolies because large corporations can dominate smaller ones and huge monopolies are extremely good at making money, and destroying or gobbling up their competitors. Unless government restrains it through antitrust law, which is
@de_machina
You sure are throwing that "liar" word around a lot without any actual justification.
"you are lying when you say Bill Gates is calling open source developer or Linux developers communists"
This is exactly what he said:
"No, I'd say that of the world's economies, there's more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don't think that those incentives should exist."
He obviously didn't say LINUX in bold letters but who exactly do you think he is talking about when he is refering to "software makers" here? The "incentive" here is that software makers should hold all their software under proprietary license and get paid for it, an arguement he's been making since his famous letter in 1976.
OK if that didn't clarify who the liar is here lets hop in the wayback machine and remember when Steve Ballmer, Bill's partner called Linux "communist" outright. He said:
"Yet Linux sort of springs organically from the earth. And it had, you know, the characteristics of communism that people love so very, very much about it."
"what you are doing is essentially changing that into an attack on open source."
I am doing no such thing. I'm merely pointing out that Linux IS communist in the classic sense of the word. It is a community working for the common good, and renouncing private ownership of the fruit of their labors for that good. There is nothing resembling an "attack" in that. It is an entirely positive thing. I'm pointing out than when Gates and Ballmer use this word it comes across as an attack because the true meaning of the word "communist" has been so distorted in today's world especially in the U.S. that it is a pejorative and they are trying to associate Linux with all the badness that was and is the U.S.S.R and China which weren't even remotely communist in reality, the were and are oppressive socialist dictatorships.
All in all you strike me as a classic anonymous coward chickenshit slinging terms like "big liar", without supporting it, while you cower under complete anonymity. If you believe what you are saying and aren't a chickenshit at least post it under your login.
@de_machina