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Bill Gates On the GPL — "We Disagree"
Dionysius, God of Wine, writes with a link to an Ars Technica story, quoting Bill Gates: "'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. (Yes, Linux fans, we're aware of how distorted this definition is.) He went back to the analogy of pharmaceuticals: 'I think if you invent drugs, you should be able to charge for them,' he said, adding with a shrug: 'That may seem radical."
Wrong, wrong, wrong! There is nothing in the GPL that forces anyone to give anything away for free (money). It explicitly says you may charge a fee for the distribution of the software. And as far as your analogy goes, it doesn't put a burden on the users (owners who use the building) except if they decide to go and build another building based on the first for someone else, they would have to release all the specs of the building.
Anyway, this analogy is ridiculous. Just to put it simply, GPL affects you if you distribute and/or modify the code. Go read the GPL, you can charge a billion dollars for your software, if no one buys it than it's just the market rejecting that price. I'm sick of people who want to spread misinformation because their business model is becoming harder to sustain.
Are you stupid or something?
...the protocols of which were non-proprietary and declassified so educational and research institutions could participate in its development and growth.
No, he's actually more informed than you are.
The Internet came from ARPANET, a project of the Department of Defense
and UNIX was invented by AT&T
UNIX was NOT invented by AT&T. It was invented by a team of computer scientists led by Ken Thompson and Dennis Richie at Bell Labs. Bell Labs was not wholly owned by AT&T until the 1980s, long after UNIX was invented. The "official" UNIX was not truly owned by AT&T until then, when Bell Labe became a wholly owned unit of AT&T.
Neither had anything to do with OSS.
The internet, and ESPECIALLY UNIX, had EVERYTHING to do with OSS. UNIX was indeed open source (but it wasn't fully Free)--when you got good ol' UNIX for your PDP-11 or whatever you got full access to the source. Also, most drivers and apps were distributed in source form back in the day.
Stallman really got the Free (libre) software movement going when vendors started removing the source code from their distributions, and he and others became frustrated when buggy software would crash their systems and they had lost the ability to patch and recompile their software to work with their specific setups. So, UNIX is in fact a very major reason open source exists today, because a one quite open ecosystem was becoming increasingly closed, and GNU was established to create open source software that would be protected from a similar fate.