Friday, January 14, 2005

Bill Gate's "Communist Comment"

Bill Gates has again taken to calling open source programmers, and advocates "communists."
Bill has launched ad hominum attacks on the open source community using this very same term. The problem is that by attacking the open source community in this manner, he completely misunderstands the economics of open source software. I imagine Mr. Gates believes that by repeating the "communist" mantra enough, it will undermine adaption of GNU/Linux in the corporate environment. The problem with this statement is that it makes Bill look very silly. No one is really worried about communists anymore Bill. Furthermore when IBM is pushing Linux do you expect your communist comment to strike a chord in the market? Do you think the business world is suddenly going to believe that IBM has become a communist collective ala 1955? The answer is obviously of course not! It's just one more comment that allows IBM's salesmen paint Bill Gates as a man who has lost touch with reality. When Microsofts's chief software architect and chairman says utterly ridiculous things like that it hinders MS's competitive advantage in the marketplace.

It also shows that Bill Gates doesn't yet understand the economics of open source yet. This is a somewhat remarkable as the open source revolution has been going on for 21 years, and covered by the computing world extensively for the last 7 years. Open source developers do their work because of the economic advantage of doing so. By adapting the GPL or other similar license developers given up certain rights in return for certain others and these have a definite economic benefit. The best way to think about it in traditional corporate terms is cross-licensing of patent portfolios . You cross license because it makes economic sense, provides protection and allows you to leverage your patent portfolio.

By improving a GPL'd product you gain an economic advantage, you don't have to build from scratch. When a project has reached a critical mass of developers, the economic advantage is tremendous. At the institional level open source makes even more economic sense. By co-operating in development, companies can leverage development efforts, avoid the much dreaded vendor lock-in and as a result of the open source process itself, a much better product. For Bill not to even understand the economic reasons behind Microsoft's greatest threat and attempt to throw the "communist" label on it, shows a tremendous problem and blind spot with Microsoft's leadership.