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Gates Elaborates on IP Communists
justin_w_hall writes "In part four of his interview with Gizmodo, big Bill Gates discusses his recent 'communist' labeling of supporters of free culture - and gets into detail about his rationale concerning Microsoft's position on DRM. Other parts of the interview: part 1, part 2, part 3."
"No, no, no. I didn't say those people were 'communists.' I did say that they're... 'dirty Marxist pinko communist reds that should be herded into camps and executed en masse.' I hate being misquoted and hope this clears up any misunderstanding."
A totalitarian dictator of intelectual property?
Boy does that make an interesting job title.
?Tzar of Intelectual Property?
I for one Welcome our Communist Free Culture Overlords...
- Your stupidity got you into this mess, why can't it get you out? -Will Rogers
He's actually kind of right. IN a comunist/socialist systme, the people own the code. (Since the people own everything.)
This is a refreshing contrast to the fascist model, where the state owns the code. In this case, the writers own the code.
If he says Linus is Stallin/lennin/marx, then he's Hitler by the same set of parameters.
-=fshalor
The problem with all these DRM issues is that no one ever brings up what happen if the artist is deceased. The record company still owns the song and making a killing.
Rule of thumb, if the artist is deceased the songs should be automatically free. None of this 2pac-after-death-release bullshit. He's dead how does he make music?!
Gates and these millionaires never talk enough about these things. They mention artists should be paid. Blah, now back to DRM.
"I really meant to say Nazis. My bad."
It means you print the Communist Manifesto on paper you made yourself before reading it, instead of buying it in a book store like all the other commies.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Wouldn't it be a bit more reasonable to put a time limiting factor on the copyright of songs ... after 20 years the song goes to the public domain, so that everyone can enjoy that music.
"No, no, no. I didn't say those people were 'communists.' I did say that they're... The question is: what incentive systems should exist in the world?"
;)
Take, like, putting soundtracks onto movies using our movie editor thing. If you have unprotected music you can take slideshows, put music to it, encapsulate it in the file, mail it aroundit works perfectly.
Why he's a regular guy next door!
Is it just me or is there something a little fishy about this interview?
-ashot
Part of Gates' argument is that in China prior to market reform, musicians were not paid. That's simply stupid. Anyone who knows anything about "Communist" regimes knows that all the ones that have existed, including China, still had money, and people got paid for their work (usually by the government). Now, you can certainly argue that musicians may not have been paid as *much* as they would have been in a market economy, but that's a different issue.
In a regular corporation, much of the capital becomes wealth distributed to executives who put it into their yacht fund, which in essence is punishing shareholders who are better served by reinvestment in the firm.
The same can be said for many industries. I think Americans underestimate, for example, how much of their healthcare spending goes into executive compensation, which is worse in that industry than most others. It makes you wonder how efficient capitalism really is in the endgame when most competitors have been washed out and locked out of the market.
Gates is essentially calling Mozilla.org, a group with a 501c3 form... comunist. Wow. Doesn't get any more whacked out than that, I guess. Microsoft seems to be getting more desperate as the days go on, probably due to the declining browser share.
This also attacks Linux communities as well. Not to mention anything at SourceForge.net... They are launching another verbal/media assault on open-source software because open-source is dangerous to closed-source software.
With the wealth of open-source software out there, not even great, free democracies (like Microsoft) can stop the spread of communist open-source software Mwahahahaha!
Silence is golden... and duct tape is silver.
And to Gizmodo? I'm surprised he even bothers to answer their phone calls at all!
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
And now, the long running attempt at a joke has FINALLY achieved humor value.
No use of it after today will ever be as fit, amusing or appropriate. Anyone else who uses the joke will remind readers of this instance of it, and they'll think "Yea, but it's still lame and stale compared to Kjuib's masterful use of the gag."
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
From the article:
"Obviously, we'll connect Xbox Love up to what we do with Messenger"
I am intrigued.
is what everybody thinks it is, as opposed to what it actually is. The ideas behind communism and democracy are very, very similar. Amish are communists in the purest sense of the word. It's just that COMMUNISM as we know is tied to Stalinist Russia, and modern China which have very little to do with the ideas of marxist communism.
You can legislate morally you can't legislate morality
Bill Gates is undoubtedly a smart guy, but in this interview he seems to have decided to follow the example of the current political administration - change the topic and pretend it is relevant. "The DRM we put into these systems is used to protect medical records, and it's used to protect things people want to protect." What a load of crap! I guess people are passing medical records around over bittorrent. That answer so far offtopic it's appalling, it's stupid, it's... bush-like. Oh, and he still calls open-source advocates communists.
Its unfortunate that this smart man (though University drop out) does nots see fundamental attraction of OpenSource... that is the ENABLEMENT TO WORK without worrying about hidden APIs, proprietary formats, or hidden costs. He equates it all to OpenSourceSoftware means some ubercorp doesn't get its coin 'cause profit of the few is baaad.
If he had a few more neurons, perhaps he would equate OpenSource to political Anarchy, because that's what it really is. Grass roots freedom of DEVELOPERS to code without blockers.
C'mon Bill. OpenSource is about making money off consulting anyway - in a world market where global economics can castrate anyone whose dollar isn't worth as much as their neighbour.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
Gates isn't smart, he's desperate. MSFT has barely nudged +/- $3 over the past four years while the rest of the tech market has taken off (particularly old rival AAPL). They're getting desperate in their smear campaign because its all about $$$...its become practically impossible to make MSFT rise with straight financials or new products, so they are trying mudslinging.
That part 4 interview is a perfect specimen of a spin artist in full spin mode.
The thing that stood out to me in the article was how billie seems to think people have no other incentive in innovating than profit. True innovators innovate for the challenge and because that's just what they LIKE doing. Profiting from it is just a side effect.
The part 3 interview, which is about XBox and everything evolving around that, has a bit of unintended humor in the first answer where Bill Gates appears to be championing for user choice and competition between vendors. Wow!
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
All we're doing is putting it in the platform. So I'm just saying, can you criticize us for having a platform that allows bits--bits, just bits; not music, not movies, not medical records, not tech things--to have any usage restriction for bits. Are we doing a disfavor to the world at large by saying some of our users, when they choose to--maybe for medical records--they can limit the accessibility of those bits?
Ah, but here is lies the classic folly. Currently, people have to decide if what they are doing is within the realms of fair use, such as copying a page from a book so they can cut out a favorite paragraph from the book and read it at presentation. DRM says that a machine has to decide if what I'm doing constitutes fair use. What happens when the computer doesn't understand my situation? Like with smart guns, if I'm wrestling with a criminal for their weapon and I manage to get it away from them, I won't be able to use it to defend myself! It's not just managing bits anymore Bill, it's managing our lives.
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
It means the new Five Year Plan will only take you 4.96 years. Or it would, if emerge'ing KDE 3.4 weren't tying up your CPU.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Why is the word communist a deragatory term now a days.
People have no clue what it means and use it as a slam. Guess 50 years of govt brainwashing worked.
Bill Gate's rationale for DRM:
/. to stop bitching about too much whitespace in this freakin' comment. Such as it is, of course.
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MicroSoft
Can be summed with: Cha-Ching!
And now to blather on to satisfy the lameness filter, and get
Have you or have not you ever contributed code to the communist operating system, Linux?
He says that money is the only insentive for individual excellence, or a step further, that DRM is the only way to reward creativity.
I believe many artists make art to add beauty to the world, and that they desire an audience, not money.
I believe that there are many artists willing to share their creative work for free, and they are compensated by the attention they get. I believe that the market is starting to demand this art. One of the great thing about this art, as with free software, is that it can be extended, collaborated with, and changed far beyond the scope of the original art. Perhaps this art isn't as good as commercial art, or as polished, but it has great advantages, the biggest one being that it is free.
Finally, having been a successful shareware author, I can say that people are very generous if you ask them for support. I could have never distributed my software through traditional channels, and would have never made any money even if I could have, but was quite successful freely distributing my work, and only asking for payment in the about box.
It is ironic that Bill Gates doesn't understand this. His operating system has started this revolution, that has removed the cost of distribution. What we are seeing now is a natural evolution of the personal computer.
Artists already get paid. Some of them are millionaires.
What it's about is squeezing a few extra bucks out of everyone by removing their ability to listen/read/watch ANYTHING without paying for it. Because the media companies just can't STAND it when someone "uses" their product without giving them money.
The whole plan boils down to this: No information will be free, ever. The libraries know this, as they've already been fighting for survival in the new world of "intellectual property" and "digital rights".
Let's see them put that into their ad campaign: "Microsoft: Setting up roadblocks since 2004."
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
OSS encourages individuals to trade directly with each other. VS Communism makes person to person trade a crime against the state, and labels it economic sabotage.
OSS actually works, and the technically best software gets the most users. VS Communism gives you products like the Trabant and makes you wait 12 years for delivery.
OSS is a choice, you are free to reject it without penalty. VS Communism is enforced by the barrel of a gun, dissidents get killed.
OSS has not caused the death of anyone. VS 100 million people have been killed by Communist regimes.
Some will argue that this is not "real, genuine" communism. Bullshit. Every case of communism in practice has been a poverty-laden murder-fest. Whining about how this is not "real" communism is astroturfing of the most foul sort.
Did communism get the first dog into space? Yes!
Did the dog ever make it back alive? You Capitalist pig dog traitor! How dare you even ask the question! (Actual answer is no. They didn't care about the life of the dog, they cared about the glory of Communism.)
If anything represents the output of Communism in the real software world, it is Windows. Poor quality, trade in it between individuals is forbiden, product is forced on the user by the OEM.
Internally at Microsoft everybody runs Windows 2003 Advanced Server on every workstation, installs every possible product, hands around the source to everything possible to anybody who asks, and never asks for a dime. However there are restrictions on what you can do with it -- you can't give it away to people outside the company, for example.
Windows is built with a huge bunch of command line tools and perl scripts. There's not much difference between the philosphies and characters of Windows Developers and Free Software Developers -- except one: Windows people don't want *you* to have the rights *they* have.
Sigh. No. In a communist/socialist system the state owns everything and just claims to do it in the name of the people.
No. Poor boy, you've been indoctrinated by American propaganda. In a true Communist state, as defined by Marx, the people own the code. Period. The states of Russia and China, which fit the model you describe, were never Communist. They were only "Communist"... ie, totalitarianism wrapped up with a prettier name.
Fascism has to do with totalitarianism and suppression of rights, not with property. The canonical fascist country (Nazi Germany) was capitalist.
Not quite. As per the Wikipedia article on the topic, Fascism typically engages in Corporatism, where the state and corporations work together to minimize the power of the working class. Thus, by that definition, the corporation and the state own your code.
You are missing his point. Communist is a trigger word. Like terrorist. It doesn't matter what it actually means he is using the word because he know how your typical american will react to it.
You are a communist. To the average american this means you belong in jail. That's what he is after.
evil is as evil does
Here's a simple rule of thumb:
Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man.
Communism is the reverse.
Programmers write free software to subvert a system that denies them the protection of their intellectual property rights by pricing legal defense of those rights out of their reach. That guys like Gates would be unsympathetic to this cruel dilemma facing the vast majority of programmers is not surprising. Indeed, given the fact that even giving all his wealth away, except some "modest" estate for his children, his childre will still be able to afford good legal counsel to establish protection for themselves.
If programmers were able to capture enough of the value of what they write to pay for the legal defense of their rights they'd probably write a lot less free software.
This gets to a fundamental problem with the incentives created by taxing things other than asset value (exempting house and tools of the trade which are subsistence assets protected by bankruptcy tradition):
Possession is rewarded over creation.
Think about it: Once you possess something, you basically have no tax burden. You enjoy the benefits of young men dutifully going out to die in wars, government subsidized infrastructure paid by wage earners, the entire legal edifice describing and protecting your rights and without you having to pay a cent. You can just soak the public for these benefits by paying only the lawyers fees to extract the benefits for yourself.
Taxing everything but possession (income, capital gains, sales, value added, etc) is just a way to tax the creative process.
Naturally, creators who are trying to get a leg up on the situation end up selling their creations cheap to those whose possession is subsidized by the tax payments of the creators.
Well, there is one exception to this rule of no taxation of possession -- and that is the patent maintanence fee. Patents are the only assets that the government taxes. This is an incredibly regressive tax hitting hardest those who are earliest to support the realization of a new technology's value -- forcing them to sell their rights ("assign") cheap to someone who has been sitting around enjying the government's protection.
It all adds up to a very nasty way of sucking capital out of the hands of creators and giving over to the hands of possessors.
So the creators, unable to change the tax laws to tax assets rather than creative processes (becuse they can't buy the Ways and Means Committee) become socialists.
This is directly related to the issue of outsourcing since if programmers who had created the value of the information industry had been allowed to retain the value they created, they wouldn't need jobs. The corporations would be paying them royalties or be paying companies owned by the programmers for the rights to their software instead of just throwing creators out on the street after extracting their youth and creativity.
A system that would work would elimnate all existing taxes (although not necessarily tariffs) and just tax net assets at a rate equal to the interest rate on the national debt -- exempting from taxation the same assets that are exempted by personal bankruptcy protection: home and tools of the trade.
Does Gates think he can beat the competition if they aren't beaten down for him by the government? This sort of arrogance by people who are the wealthiest isn't offset by giving their money to charity. They are eating the children of the middle class and destroying the future of the country that made them rich.Seastead this.
Poor Bill. He can't sleep at night thinking of impoverished Chinese musicians -- so he unleashes the Business Software Alliance to coerce entire nations to pony up more cash for Windows, all in the name of intellectual property. A regular advocate for the little guy, he is...
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
You don't actually understand what an analogy is do you? To claim Gates is, or is like, Hitler, is absurd. Hitler is dead and Gates is not a political leader.
To make the comparison of Gates/Hitler and Nazi Party/Microsoft (in terms of control and viciousness in their respective arenas) is both relevant and vaguely insightful as an extension of Gates' use of "communist" to describe Free Culture proponents.
Understand now?
the layman's guide to computer science
Seriously. But only on topics that he obviously knows NOTHING about.
For instance, he was wrong about the impact of the internet. He has also been wrong in forcasting technology trends, 14 YEARS IN A ROW.
I admire the fact that Bill has been able to become rich and successful. To his credit, he drove his company to take risks and challenge his competitors. If it weren't for the principles of Microsoft fighting for their market share, the industry might look much less inviting than it is today. Competition is a good thing, and Microsoft is nothing if not competative.
But when Bill wanders off the reservation, he gets himself in trouble. His ideas about world health are noble, but I don't think US pharma companies look too kindly at his dumping millions of dollars into areas where they could be raking in profits.
Free medicine? Ask Big Pharma what they thing that political philosophy constitutes.
Bill should keep his discussion focused on Microsoft and his competition. That is what he is best at. Commenting on open source products, not the philosophy that creates them, is probably a whole lot safer and let prone to embarrass His Highness.
Bill Gates is as clueless about open source as Nicolas II was about his peasantry.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
-- to the tune of the Mickey Mouse theme ---
Who's the leader of the gang who's stolen our PC?
M-I-C-R-O-S - opps! OH NO! - F - T!
Mickey Mouse! Microsoft!
Mickey Mouse! Microsoft!
The richest man who ever lived is calling you a thief,
M-I-C-R-O-S - 'opps! OH NO!' - F - T!
Where's my file?
Microsoft!
All my work?
Microsoft!
Could there ever be an end to all this needless grief?
M-I-C-R-O-S - 'opps! OH NO!' - F - T!
I use this an anger-management mantra whenever I get DASPO'ed (being driven into a state mouth-foaming rage by the work of a Dumb-As-Shit-Programmer). It usually works.
I would be interested in learning of any other ways to control the anger that occasionally happens after getting zapped by truly stupid software. I guess Slashdot would be the place to ask. Everyone must have some special secret little tricks that they use to avoid going postal whenever bad software destroys hours of work.
Jezz-I hope so.
Take for instance RMS, who says not only should software be given away for $0, but if you charge money for software, you are committing an unethical act.
Nope, it's about freedom, freedom only. Learn some GNU philosophy before you open your mouth.
Poor boy, you've been indoctrinated by American propaganda.
LOL. Think so? I am fairly sure I know much more about Communism than you and it has nothing to do with *American* propaganda...
In a true Communist state, as defined by Marx, the people own the code. Period.
Techincally speaking you're wrong on at least two counts. First, under Communism as described by Marx there would be no state at all. So talking about a "Communist state" is nonsense by definition. Second, under Communism (again, as described by Marx) there would be no property rights. This means that there's no such concept as property -- and that's very different from "people own the code".
You might also have noticed that I was talking about "communist/socialist" system -- meaning the socioeconomic system that actually existed in places like Soviet Union, China, etc. Some people call it communist (and they call e.g. Sweden socialist). Other people call it socialist (and they call only theoretical Marx's constructs "true" communism". That's a standard terminology mess when talking about this topic.
Fascism typically engages in Corporatism, where the state and corporations work together to minimize the power of the working class. Thus, by that definition, the corporation and the state own your code.
Nice handwaving. Can you be more explicit about the logical jump from "working together to minimize the power of the working class" to a programmer not being legally able to own his code?
Besides, under Marxist analyst a programmer is basically a skilled craftsman and occupies a position between working class and bourgeoisie...
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Sigh. You're confusing "free as in speech" and "free as in beer". I challenge you to produce any evidence whatsoever that RMS has ever said that software should be given away for $0. In fact the GNU Manifesto specifically encourages charging for software (and/or support and warranties for software).
When RMS says that software should be "free", he means that you should be free to do whatever you like with any software you buy. Contrast the GNU GPL with the ridiculous shrink wrap licenses most proprietary software comes with. It's the GPL that best supports the idea of private property, i.e. you actually get to "own" your copy of GPL software!
If he says Linus is Stallin/lennin/marx, then he's Hitler by the same set of parameters.
Ok, as an outspoken communist I NEED to slap you around a bit.
NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER Put Stalin in the same grouping as Lenin and Marx. EVER. Any true Communist is very outspoken about how much Stalin was not a communist (under Lenin's, Marx's, Trotski's, or anyone else even remotely credible's definition)
A MUCH more appropriate comment would have literally been:
If he says Linus is Lenin/Marx/etc. then he's Stalin by the same set of parameters.
Any time a topic like this comes up, I feel the need to somehow explain to people that Open Source IS a very Communist idea, and that's exactly why it's so great.
"From each according to their ability, to each according to their need."
Seems to kind of summarize the Open Source ideology, right? The people that can code, should. The people that can make graphics, should. The people that can only use the system and bitch when it breaks, should. And if everyone does this, everyone should get what they need out of it.
The quote is from Marx.
Think twice about saying that OSS isn't a very communist ideal, because it is.
Sorry, this turned from a reply into a rant in about 2 minutes.
Not Free(as in beer). Free(as in "I'm free to beat you over the head for being a dumbass")
Specifically, it represents the "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" aspect of communism.
Microsoft, on the other hand, represents the "Central planning enforced via coercion from an unaccountable monopoly" aspect of communism.
If Gates & co. are going to try and keep the communism analogy alive, this more precise view ought to be brought up to reporters at every opportunity. I can't speak for everyone, but I know all my negative associations with Communism come from its relation to totalitarianism, not its relation to sharing.
"Free culture" software licenses lke GPL are not free.
Public domain is free.
I read this as Mr. Bill confusing a market economy with a non-market one. His argument is a straw man... that one can not approach "greatness" without being rewarded with money.
Funny, my Dad is an Episcopal priest and one of the things he taught during his sermons was the value of good works. These are (for those who skipped Church) the kind of things where you expect no reward, payment, etc.
Most people consider "good works" to be doling out food to the poor. But I would argue that writing something that a) seems useful to others and b) gives one some joy is also a good work.
After all, how many people went "thank god" when their system DIDN'T crash because some 13 year old decided to create the Windows worm du jour?
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
I wish the people that bandy around terms like communist would stop and consider what these terms mean.
I am a worker (In my case an intellectual worker, but that doesn't matter) under both capitalism & communism I would be creating a product.
Under capitalism I create something, and I can sell it or give it away as I wish. It doesn't matter if that something is a wooden table or a computer program. It's my choice what I do with it.
The person I sell/gift it to can do with it as he or she wishes.
In other words, my product is covered by a BSD licence.
Under communism everything (including the fruits of my labours) belongs to "the people", in other words "the state". I make something, the state pays me a wage and it determies how and by whom the product is used.
Under capitalism (as described by Marx) competitive pressure forces the price of commodity goods down towards the cost of production. The producers can only make a profit by reducing their cost of production, including wages, to a minimum.
What's the true commodity cost of software? The cost of downloading and perhaps the cost of burning it to a CD.
Under communism, the state restricts competition, and interferes in the market, thus keeping the price of commodities high enough to ensure a decent wage for the workers.
The exact mechanism for how it restricts competition isn't that relevant. It could be "5 year plans" stating exactly how many will be produced, it could be limiting the number of people permitted to make the product, or it could be changing the patent rules to permit patenting the product rather than the old "patenting the process" model.
Under communism you have the state creating or enforcing monopolies on the production of commodity items. It doesn't matter if those items are cornflakes or software, the prices are kept artificially high to permit "the workers" to keep more of the wealth.
Looking to the USSR experiment, "the workers" that retained the wealth weren't so much the ones on the factory floor as the managers & the communist functionaries that replaced the former owners, but no-one can argue that the upper echelons of the society of the USSR were wealthy.
Unfortunately, most political discourse is on this level. We all have little clusters of neurons in our brains that encode concepts like "communism", "terrorism", "family", "God", "liberal", etc., and much of politics is the process of getting people to connect them to other little clusters like "Good" and "Evil". There is no requirement that this process be rational. Once those trigger words are properly linked, one can then use them to attack other ideas that may or may not even be related.
Back when the Soviet Union collapsed, and as China was becoming a major trading partner and thereby transitioning from "evil" to "OK", I wondered what bogeyman we would come up with to replace "communism". Up through Reagan, it was always an election issue who was going to be "tough on communism". It's not hard to see what the new replacement is!
I also don't have much of an issue with artists being compensated somehow for their work. There are already laws to govern that, although some of the laws are bad, people often break those laws, and the legal system hasn't yet caught up with how best to deal with it.
The problem here is that Microsoft has taken things upon itself to become the judge, jury and executioner of intellectual property disputes. Even worse, Microsoft's algorithm for determining correctness is a direct interpretation of whatever the distributer of given content happens to say. Microsoft accomodates those who claim ownership by stripping the rights of everyone else to dispute that claim.... at least without paying unaffordable mountains of legal bills.
I think it's mostly a question of whether Microsoft should be allowed to act as some kind of international legal system to enforce disputes between parties. Effectively it's enforcing things through a vigilante system with no intelligent arbitration about what's correct.
For instance, in New Zealand (where I am), some copyrighted materials enter public domain earlier than the USA. It becomes legal to reproduce them regardless of what the original content owner says. (Content owners aren't always authors, by the way.) But if I were to try and take advantage of that, Microsoft would jump in and tell me that I can't, unless the entity that claims ownership says it's okay.
Bill's trying to distance himself from accusations of this type of thing in the interview for obvious reasons, but it's exactly what Microsoft is doing. I don't particularly want a Microsoft-determined legal system.
>>Under communism everything (including the fruits of my labours) belongs to "the people", in other words "the state". I make something, the state pays me a wage and it determies how and by whom the product is used.
Not exactly. According to Marx, there would be no 'states' or governments. Communism would arrive when people had had enough of being exploited. They would spontaneously and without any leaders, overthrow their capitalist oppressors.
Of course, that is not how it worked under the Soviet Union. But Lenin justified it by saying having a state, like the USSR, was a temporary measure until they could establish a perfect communist world.
What you previously described is actually closer to Fascism. That's another word commonly misused by the general public to describe rascists and such.
Fascism was/is actually an economic theory whose chief proponent was Mussolini. Though it's come to be associated primarily with Hitler's National Socialists, it is actually primarily an economic theory.
-dj
- dj
Comment removed based on user account deletion
> He's actually kind of right. IN a comunist/socialist systme, the people own the code. (Since the people own everything.)
/. right?
I thought, in Communist Russia, the code owned the people!?
This is still
-David
I don't see why it's a surprise that Gates takes no real position on the philosophy of IP. His aim is to make money, and one product that his company offers is a method for DRM. This interviewer is sitting there trying to make Gates squirm, and it's rather silly.
To sum up what Gates says: 1) There is a need for DRM that comes from the idea that artists should get paid for what they do. 2) M$ get money to wrap content up in that DRM. 3) See you later, I'm going to buy a few more houses.
His argument is the same as it always is: If you don't give me your money, you won't be able to do what you want. It's hard to pull that out of that rambling BS piece, but the argument is there. In a nutshell it is, you must accept my DRM or "authors" (I think he really means big media publishers) won't let you have their content. In this case he further's his argument by telling you that you never had the rights you thought you did if the "author" decides you don't have it. Once again, he pretends he wishes to reward others for their work. As usual, he tries to shore it all up with insults, "communist" this time but he's always called his customers "theives". You can see the same arguments from him all the way back in 1976
The key quotes are:
What we want is to have as much content as possible available. ... an envelope ... in order to get authors to be willing to put an ever broader range of content on our platform ... there's content that can only be there if it's rights protected ...
DRM is just like a speed bump that reminds you whether you're staying within the scope of rights that you have or you don't.
This is an astoundingly dishonest position at every level. The fact of the mater is that authors ARE putting their work up on the Creative Commons for everyone to use without restrictions. They don't want Mr. Gate's "protection". They want to compete on their merits and publish in a normal, and easy to use way. Surely, authors have enough sense to know that the control they pass onto big publishers through DRM will be lost to them forever. Right now the RIAA can threaten to keep your work off air and out of stores. Can you imagine the power music publisher would have if they could throw a few bits in their database and prevent your music from working anywhere? Not even the big publisher's believe that they will remain in control of their rights if they lend Microsoft their trust.
Mr. Gates and his DRM scheme are not "enablers" of any sort. His and big media's expansion of copyright and other forms of government granted exclusive franchises are the reason we have more consolidated and stagnant media than ever. When you give your money to this man, you hurt your rights in every way. If you use his software, he owns your system. Now he wants to own your media too. No thanks, I do just fine without him or his software.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The issue is that for many of us (I would actuall include both RMS and ESR on this side) this is a debate not only about basic liberty but also about engineering the best possible economic environment for software development. I think Gates tries to look at things this way too, but Microsoft is in a difficult position.
You have to understand how the proprietary software market works, and why it is fundamentally impossible for a small player to compete with MS, IBM, Oracle, etc. in this environment to understand why Microsoft is so heavily against open source--- the inherent economy of scale of software development inhibits competition.
Free/Open Source Software is partly about liberty, but it is also about a more flexible software development pricing and payment model than one can have with proprietary software. In FOSS, payment for software development is made on demand, while in proprietary software, it is made in arrears to all users whether they want the feature or not. So in both cases, there is economic incentive to create great work. While there are those who believe that intellectual property law is inherently bad, I think that we need to see patent and copyright law for what it is: a temporary lease of public property in return for contribution of the property to the public. Gates seems to understand this in the interview and seems to advocate long terms and large protections as if the value of these contributions demanded it.
However, his viewpoint is nothing compared to the entertainment industry who is unwilling to let any copyrights lapse. They (the content providers, which Microsoft is getting into bed with) are even categorized by Mr. Gates as extremists! This does not give me much hope for Microsoft.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
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Unfortunately Gates has jumped into the political arena and is drawing us into the ring. By calling us communists he is trying to distract attention from ourselves, anti communistic attitudes in the states are still strong amongst Joe Public, if Bill manages to tap this resource of sentiment and use it against open source or free software supporters it may set the whole open source back or at least slow it's growth and adoption by Joe Public down. It is a great political strategy that has worked for many politicians in winning a campaign. It's time for Slashdot and linux leaders to form a foundation focused on advertising and image shaping of linux and to combat Bill Gates in that arena. We cannot ignore this anti linux advertising for much longer, We need to fight tooth and nail against false images that the political gates is trying to place on us. otherwise Joe Public adoption of linux in North America will be set back or slow down in North America. Fortunate it willbe money that will drive it and it will not be stopped, but for Joe Public it is in our best interest to work to keep the current pace and to speed up it's adoption. Anyhow, I'm interested to see and read others thoughts on this perspective....