Stallman Attacks Gates, Microsoft, & Charity Foundation

An anonymous reader writes "Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, has an article in the BBC in which he maintains that Gates' departure from Microsoft doesn't mean the end of proprietary software and that the free software community needs to stand strong to undo the damages Bill Gates, Microsoft, and other proprietary software vendors (explicitly naming Apple & Adobe amongst them) have done. And he slips in a claim that the Bill and Melinda Gates charity foundation doesn't really help the poor; it just pretends to while actually subjecting them to greater harm."

Comments

Too far

[sayfawa]

I'm one of the biggest GPL zealots around here, and RMS is high on my list of respected people, but come on. There are whole medical labs dedicated to fighting TB and AIDS in southern Africa that wouldn't exist without the Bill&Melinda foundation. How is that hurting anything?

Re:Too far

[ThePhilips]

As well as on numerous occasions (esp. during M$ antitrust trial) it was revelead that Bill & Melinda Gates foundation was used to funnel money into "independent" entities who were FUDing against Open Source and other M$ competitors. Also there were many reports of donations filled with freebies like M$Wind0ze and M$Office "for millions dollars." Hardly a charity.

Check that too - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_and_Melinda_Gates_Foundation#Criticisms

They might be doing something good - for a change - but essentially the B&MGF is business and nothing else.

Re:Too far

[spauldo]

I've heard this before, although generally about cancer. The problem is, that idea only works if the drug companies are a cartel.

Let's say you're an executive for EvilCo, and your company develops that one month treatment for AIDS. You've got two choices:

1) Patent it, sell it for major short term profits
2) Sweep it under the rug, continue selling treatments for long term profits

Option two sounds the best, right? But you don't exist in a vacuum. If your researchers found the cure, then how long until SatanDrugs, LLC or BeelzePharm makes that same discovery, and will they do the same thing you are? Maybe they already have. Maybe they're on their way to the patent office now...

It's kind of like the old prisoner's dilemma scenario. You can't trust every other company to act for the collective good for the industry, and since any one of you could sell out for short term profits, why not you?

There's also another problem, which is that it's a cold hearted bastard thing to do. If your R&D department actually discovered a cure, you think the people who know about it are going to sit quietly while you sweep it under the rug? What kind of PR are you going to get when they go public? The only way to guarantee they'd keep quiet would be to have them killed. Otherwise, your company would have the worst PR incident since the holocaust.

RMG contributed a LOT.

[Futurepower(R)]

"Free software existed fine without RMS."

No, it didn't.

Yes, a software package that was already written and finished and made public would of course continue to exist. But there were literally thousands of companies and people who would take advantage of someone else's work and give nothing in return.

Re:You see, there's this thing called economics

[russotto]

Free software is, as far as the whole of society is concerned, much cheaper than proprietary software, because society only has to pay to solve (the software portion of) a particular problem once.

Careful, a similar argument was once used (and occasionally still is) to claim that communism with its central planning was superior economically because the competition of capitalism involved wasteful duplication of effort. The claim proved a bit flawed when put to the test.

(note: I am not comparing free or open source software to communism. Just the arguments to arguments supporting communism)

Re:You see, there's this thing called economics

[Anonymous Coward]

The economics issue extends to the operations of Bill and Melinda's "charitable" giving as well. You see, the foundation actively opposes generic drugs. I'm not one to suggest Bill is malicious. He really truly believes that the free market doesn't work, that government must establish artificial monopolies on ideas, and his foundation would like to apply the same principles that enabled Microsoft to dominate the US software market to the world pharmaceutical market.

People disagree. Others believe that the market should be left to its own devices and find its own equilibrium. Some would say that denying access to generic drugs by pressuring governments to avoid doing business with companies that produce them, and by also pressuring them to establish, practice and enforce US laws establishing artificial monopolies over ideas on their soil (this is ironically called "free trade"), is causing great harm to the world's poor. Yes, even killing them.

The debate about the usefulness of artificially concentrating great wealth in the hands of the very few so that these superior intellects may shower the rest of us with their munificence extends beyond the world of software. It's entirely appropriate that RMS would be discussing these issues as they relate to the Gates' "charitable" foundation, which invests in the very pharmaceutical companies who's profits are tied to squashing competition from generic drug manufacturers. Thank god someone is doing it, because heaven knows we can't count on our self-interested media conglomerates to provide any kind of balanced perspective.

B&M Gates smoke curtain....

[xtracto]

Ahem, ahem...

I am not really impressed by B&M gates foundation... and the use they have given to it:

e-Mexico.

Which was about to be kickstarted with Open Source (with the backup of HP, IBM, Sun, etc)... until Bill Gates went to Mexico to speak with Presidente Fox... aaaaand, guess what:

Microsoft has pledged $60 million in software and training to help fund Internet kiosks that are being built in remote communities. The software maker has also allotted $10 million to train workers in small and mid-size businesses, along with an additional grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to the country's VAMOS MEXICO program to be used to move the country's libraries online.

Ohh, Vamos Mexico... the foundation from Fox's wife which has been investigated for allegued corruption practices.

Oh yes, B&M Gates foundation are God's messengers.

More about Richard Matthew Stallman

[Futurepower(R)]

More:

Quotes from Richard Matthew Stallman:

"Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, that you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone."

"Fighting software patents one by one will never eliminate the danger of software patents, any more than swatting mosquitoes will eliminate malaria."

"Free software' is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, think of 'free' as in 'free speech,' not as in 'free beer'."

More quotes:

"People get the government their behavior deserves. People deserve better than that."

"Odious ideas are not entitled to hide from criticism behind the human shield of their believers' feelings."

"Injustice is happening now; suffering is happening now. We have choices to make now. To insist on absolute certainty before starting to apply ethics to life decisions is a way of choosing to be amoral." (Slashdot interview, 1 May 2000)

Lee Hood is using Java

[Latent Heat]

Lee Hood, the dude who developed the automated gene sequencer, was at the U at the end of May. He talked about what he is up to these days, which is running some kind of medical research foundation in Seattle using a lot of Bill and Melinda Gates money with some NIH support in the mix.

He mentioned that while all of the biology and engineering tech were all IP'd up, the software side was FOSS -- Google Cytoscape to look up their software project. Predictably, he mentioned that Bill Gates was against this arrangement, and Lee Hood mentioned it took a lot of upper-management pep talk and persuasion to get his in-house software people to be happy about it as well.

I didn't bother asking Lee Hood questions about the software aspects as it was a biology symposium and the grad students were more interested in the biology aspects of the project, but I looked up Cytoscape, and guess what, it is written and extendable in Java. And this is largely on Bill and Melinda's dime.

Re:You see, there's this thing called economics

[BlueParrot]

Not quite. It was found that for certain types of goods and services ( healthcare, education, defense etc... )it worked rather well. In fact, it works so well that even the USA is considering to finance healthcare through a centrally planned system rather than the free market. They don't say it too loudly, and obscure what it really is by calling it other things, but that is essentially what is being done.

The flaw of comunism was not that it recognised that SOME goods and services were better provided throughc entral planning, the flaw was that it assumed that the best way to provide one type of good would necessarily be the best way for ALL goods. In reality central planning works well when goods have large positive externalities, and especially so for public goods. Conversely a free market works well for goods that have no, or minor , externalities, and fails horribly in other cases ( pollution, health care, etc.. ).

The flaw of capitalism is the same as the flaw of communism. It is based on an assumption that all goods and services are equivalent. In reality the extent to which suplier and consumer in a private market pay and benefit from all the effects of a good ( positive as well as negative ) depend greatly upon how much third parties are affected by the goods production and use. For some goods the costs and benefits are accounted for almost completely by the market , for these goods capitalism works well. For other goods there are large external costs and benefits that the market doesn't care about. For these goods capitalism fails horribly.

If you knew your economics you would be well aware that capitalism as well as comunisms are naive generalisations of principles that only hold true under very specific conditions.

Re:You see, there's this thing called economics

[ultranova]

Careful, a similar argument was once used (and occasionally still is) to claim that communism with its central planning was superior economically because the competition of capitalism involved wasteful duplication of effort. The claim proved a bit flawed when put to the test.

Actually, I'd say that the two main examples of communism - Russia and China - showed it to be a raging success. Let's not forget that, when communists came to power, Russia was a backwards agrarian society which had just lost World War I and had it's government collapse, and China was little more than a bad joke, having been a partially occupied and economically abused puppet of both West and Japan for years, not to mention having gone through several civil wars and in fact being in the middle of one.

Both states became superpowers under communist rule. Of course they were also dictatorships with a habit of disappearing anyone opposing the rulers, but that had always been true for both; neither China nor Russia had ever been democracies nor even moderately free societies in their histories, and arguably still aren't.

So no, communism hasn't been the unmitigated disaster people often think it was for the states which tried it. The problems associated with it come from the social conditions and traditions prior to the revolution, and the process of revolution itself. For countries which adopted left-leaning policies in a peaceful fashion and didn't succumb to dictatorship and personality cults, they have been extremely helpful; see the Nordic countries, for example.

So no, I don't think "sounds like communism" is a valid counterargument to anything.

(note: I am not comparing free or open source software to communism. Just the arguments to arguments supporting communism)

The irony here is that free software, by putting the means of production into the hands of the users, pretty much accomplishes the basic idea of communism (which was that labourers, not factory-owners, should get the profit from their labour).

Re:You see, there's this thing called economics

[ChatHuant]

I call bullshit on this.

I call bullshit on your bullshit.

1. Microsoft didn't even target "regular Joe" computers. They aimed to capture the enterprise market, and succeeded. Their software was extremely boring to the "regular Joe", but they managed to estabilish themselves as a de facto standard, and then creeped into the home desktop.

That's a very ignorant statement. On the contrary, Microsoft was always interested in home machines, since the beginning; they wrote code for the hobbyist Altair systems before the PC was even a gleam in IBM's eye. In the eighties, Microsoft defined the MSX standard specifically for home computers. Microsoft was one of the first companies to release games on the PC, with the first version of Flight Simulator available in '82.

2. Microsoft was at the right place in the right time, and their monopoly was essentially sponsored by IBM - any other company would have done the job as well.

3. The first "regular Joe" computers - ZX Spectrum, Atari, Commodore, Amiga - had nothing to do with Microsoft.

Shows what you know. The Commodore and the Amiga all shipped with BASIC written by and licensed from Microsoft. The Atari also licensed the language from MS, and sold it as a separate product. Microsoft also released a lot of software for Apple - guess who wrote the most popular BASIC for the Apple II? That's right, Microsoft. And Word for the Apple Macintosh was available in 1985, very soon after the Macintosh release in 1984.

4. The real reason why the price of computing dived were related to the price of hardware falling dramatically over a short period

So, you're saying the price of computers went down because the price of computers went down. BZZT! The price went down because of the commoditization of computing, because of the huge economies of scale mass production allows. And mass production become possible because people suddenly wanted computers, and bought them in droves. And, except for a technically savvy minority, people didn't want computers for the processor they had inside. They wanted them for the software running on them, for games, word processing, desktop publishing (which was quite a buzzword at a time).