Gates: Open Source Kills Jobs 976
theodp writes "On the Malaysian leg of a whirlwind Asian tour, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates voiced his concerns over the growing goodwill towards open source, especially in Asia, emphasizing how damaging open source software can be. 'If you don't want to create jobs or intellectual property, then there is a tendency to develop open source. It is not something you do as a day job. If you want to give it away, you work on it at night,' he said. Gates, who apparently has never contended with the horrors of a VB upgrade, when on to say that '[Open source] doesn't guarantee upward compatibility.'"
I know of those horrors (Score:1, Informative)
It became feature creep as I wanted to use more and more "better" functions. Then the last thought, I remember is "Hey, C# looks better!"
A week of coding made me scrap everything and build up my store credit program from scratch. Has ANYONE successfully converted a VB 6 program into a
Interesting, considering... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Gates is right (Score:5, Informative)
Your '80s DOS program will probably run fine under Linux as well. In both cases, the 16-bit environment runs in a VM.
Re:stupid argument (Score:1, Informative)
Article on Open Source Economics (Score:2, Informative)
It's quite old, but I think it's still relevant. It's the article that changed my opinions about the economics of Free/Open Source software.
The author deals with most of the common arguments against OSS/FS quite effectively. A must read for Bill Gates.
Let's make an important distinction (Score:5, Informative)
- Copyrights: open source software is still copyrighted as much as closed source software. He can't be talking about this sort of intellectual property.
- Patents: can also apply equally well to open or closed source software - indeed, some people call for software patents to explicitly include source code showing how the claimed "invention" is implemented.
- Trademarks: not really relevant; they're concerned with brand names and don't depend on if one chooses to share the underlying source code to a program or not.
- Trade secrets. Ah. We might be onto something here! Yes, something isn't a secret if you share it openly. Gee whizz - who'da thunk that?!
Yes, what Gates is saying is that you can't have trade secrets if you have open source software - only that's far too obvious a statement to make and any audience would see straight through it. So he uses the meta-FUD term "intellectual property" instead. What a sham. As with the RIAA and MPAA, what Microsoft really needs is a law that forbids circumventing an "effective" business model...
Re:Gates is right (Score:3, Informative)
While in some cases true, this is not always a bad thing. Interface changes allow progress. Linux would not be anwhere near where it is today if developers were afraid of breaking interfaces.
These days, I suspect the opposite: most users install programs from binary packages not source. Most compatibility problems are binary compatibility -- a simple recompile would solve the problem. This is why we have distributions do the work of configuring packages for us. Changes that break binary compatibility, though, are usually restricted to major releases. For instance, as far as I know, the policy for the Linux kernel is to not change any binary interfaces between user space and kernel space between minor releases (except maybe adding new system calls or proc files, which won't affect existing applications). Some parts of this interface are not likely to ever change (such as fork, open, write, select, kill, etc...). Changing the binary interface within the kernel is fine, because it won't break anything outside the kernel (though it is a nuisance for the people developing the Nvidia drivers). Red hat has used a similar policy: binary compatibility is maintained between RH 8.0, 8.1, and 8.2, but RH 9.0 is not binary compatible with 8.0. Recompiling code can be annoying, but I'd rather have a system that improves significantly with each release.
If you see computers as a means of generating revenue, OSS is a bad thing. If you see computers as a tool to solve problems, OSS is a good thing. Jobs may be lost in some cases, but society will be better off because people can use the full capability of their computers, and effort will not be wasted re-solving the same problem over and over again. Whether efficient problem solving is good for the economy is a matter of debate, though.
-jim
Re:Smart and evil?? (Score:3, Informative)
Huh? Last time I installed Windows on a dual-boot computer, it didn't ask to take the whole drive or format my non-windows partitions. Actually, the partition software in the installer did exactly what I asked it to, and nothing more.
Maybe you're thinking of Windows "restore" cds (ugh) that come with most OEM PCs. These usually just bulldoze the whole disk and return it to the original setup.
Re:Upward compatibility? (Score:1, Informative)
Volunteer Work and Unions (Score:5, Informative)
Sad as it is, some unions do use that argument. There is a nearby state park that has unionized maintenance workers. It is a several thousand acre park, which, due to budget cuts, only has two full time maintenance employees. Both guys work hard (maintaining roads grass, trash, buildings, etc,) but there is only so much two guys can do, and the parks trails are in terrible shape. Not just in need of mulch or stone, but washed out or nearly impassible due to overgrowth, downed trees, etc.
Some local businesses offered to donate tools and materials and some local Sierra Club (et al) members offered to volunteer their time to get the trials back into shape. Since it is a public park and is currently not useable for hiking by the public, I thought that was a great gesture from the community. Can you guess what heppened?
The state union told them to go stick it somewhere. Despite the fact that the two employees couldn't and wouldn't work on the trails - which is part of their job description - they wouldn't let anyone else do a "union job."
So the trails are still crap, now two years later.
Re:Betamax/vhs (Score:1, Informative)
Beta *was* higher quality, but VHS was a lot cheaper, and quality was 'close enough' for the masses..
That's irrelevent. what was relevent was that you couldn't fit an entire movie onto a Betamax tape, but you could fit one onto a VHS tape.
Re:More nonsense (Score:3, Informative)
Admittedly, some of the data is conflicting; see what OpenSecrets says for 2000 [opensecrets.org] vs what commondreams says [commondreams.org], and it appears to change over time [opensecrets.org] so it's not that simple
Re:History is against him. (Score:2, Informative)
Is this fact? No, but it is a general rule.
Re:whew... (Score:5, Informative)
Many, many tech companies don't pay dividends on stock (albeit in a liot of cases because they've yet to see their first thin dime of profit), however MS *does* pay dividends. Their first dividend was 8 cents in early 2003 and more recently they paid 16 cents.
Repost ! - j/k (Score:2, Informative)
AN OPEN LETTER TO HOBBYISTS
By William Henry Gates III
February 3, 1976
An Open Letter to Hobbyists
To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of
good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and
an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted. Will
quality software be written for the hobby market?
Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to
expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial
work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year
documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K,
EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used
exceeds $40,000.
The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are
using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent,
however, 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all
Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have
received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth
less than $2 an hour.
Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal
your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share.
Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS
for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software.
The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a
break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being
written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist
can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his
product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested
a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing
8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this
software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.
What about the guys who re-sell Altair BASIC, aren't they making money on
hobby software? Yes, but those who have been reported to us may lose in the
end. They are the ones who give hobbyists a bad name, and should be kicked
out of any club meeting they show up at.
I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up, or has a
suggestion or comment. Just write to me at 1180 Alvarado SE, #114,
Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than being able
to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software.
Bill Gates
General Partner, Micro-Soft
So why is it ... (Score:5, Informative)
Funny thing is that these jobs have been paid for mostly by non-US companies who are trying to get out from under the thumb of either IBM or Microsoft (or both). And they're hiring Americans like me to help them do it.
A big selling point has been that N years from now I can guarantee that the software will still run and they'll still be able to read all their files. They've learned the hard way that this isn't always true with proprietary systems.
And I can easily explain to them how they can verify that there are no hidden tricks (trojans, backdoors, etc) in my code or in any of the lower-level software. Neither my code nor anything in "the system" can be sending their data off to some stranger's data warehouse. Granted, they'll have to keep around a staff of unix/linux geeks, who will both study the code and monitor the appropriate online fora. But they don't need to hire as many such geeks as they have on site now to keep their IBM/MS stuff running, so even that's a win.
Maybe eventually we'll see the day when all software has been written and no more is needed. But I suspect that day's still a long way off. And the world is growing more and more dependent on smaller and smaller computers to keep everything running.
So for the forseeable future, they'll still need lots of people who understand that, no matter what managers or marketing people say, 2+2 is always 4, not 5 or 3.95 or something desirable. (Except when it's 3.99999999998 of course, but any true geek will understand that, too.
So I'll predict that people with the twisted (i.e., logical) minds required by programming will continue to have jobs until long after all of us are gone.
Of course, we may all have to move to India or China, as the patent system shuts down software development in the Western world.
Re:whew... (Score:1, Informative)
Outside the server market, Linux has made virtually no inroads in the PC space. Moreover, where it has made progress (usually by way of government fiat), users have typically run to (or back to) Microsoft where they've been allowed to. Linux is simply too far behind, and there's no evidence at all that it will ever be able to catch up.
The loss of the server market would be a blow to Microsoft, but with increasingly comples hardware systems, it isn't clear that open-source developers can keep the gap between Linux and Windows from widening (much less narrow it). As long as the gap in hardware and software support remains, Linux will be an irrelevance on the desktop.
Re:History is against him. (Score:3, Informative)
Free Software is not a fundementalist religion or a cult. You get to choose how little or how much you take. You might simply replace Microsoft and leave most of the lowend-pc-shrinkwrap market untouched.
Building on a foundation of Free Software doesn't require EVERYTHING else to be freeware as well.
Re:Scale, not growth. (Score:5, Informative)
SNIP
I interviewed the unix administrater at a local university as part of some report I had to write this year, and he told me how he takes code from the net, debuggs it for his architecture/configuration, and deploys it on the school's webservers. That's his whole job! And this job wouldn't exist if he was using Microsoft's generic offerings.
This is interesting. One of the real benefits I have noticed from my job is that the life of the network or systems architect becomes more interesting with OSS than with proprietary off-the-shelf-software (POTSS).
With POTSS, people more or less build networks using recipie-like instructions. While you *could* do that with OSS, it usually doesn;t happen. The reason is that suddenly the business hass access to *a lot* more capability for the same cost (including man-hours) and so you end up with people whos whole job is to build systems by stringing together lots of little pieces. This approach is also the UNIX paradigm, even with regard to proprietary software, though that usually only exists at the high-end.
What OSS does is bring the Power if high-end computing systems within reach of smaller players. This is why it is so powerful and why I think that it will win out over the long run.
Re:Upward compatibility? (Score:3, Informative)
Upward compatibility is the ability for older versions to continue working on newer platforms or with newer devices or sofware. USB 1.1 is upward compatible with USB 2.0 -- any USB 2.0 device will work on USB 1.1, and any USB 1.1 device will work on USB 2.0. It's simply backward compatability from the POV of the older system. Typically one can design a system for some upward compatibility, but it's usually just a matter of perspective. You can't really break upward compatability, only backward, it's the way time works and all
Every time glibc changes incompatibly, or whenever linux rearranges the device system, it breaks backward compatibility. If linux continues to do this, it's safe to say that linux is not upward compatible. Frankly this isn't quite as serious as Bill Gates makes it out to be, but MS is just freakish about backward compatibility at the OS level. Office is somewhat more cavalier, but hey, you can still open Word 3.0 docs in Word 2003.
A new CPU architecture is simply a new build target. If intel doesn't make it backward compatible with the ia32/64 line, you can't expect existing XP binaries to be compatible with it.
Re:Late post but . . . (Score:3, Informative)
There's also a Fiat vs. Mercedes syndrome here : people ASSUME it's going to be better because it's expensive.