Gates Elaborates on IP Communists 795
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."
Gates View of OpenSource (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Is he "smarter than that"? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Artists should be paid (Score:3, Interesting)
On the whole, I agree with you... the protections should be shorter - maybe (artist's life + 20) or 50 years (whichever comes first). I would also like to see shorter periods for certain types of IP - software especially.
It's not about artists getting paid (Score:3, Interesting)
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".
Cannot possibly be communism! (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Musicians in China (Score:3, Interesting)
Not exactly. Gates' argument is that the musicians in communist China had no property rights in their creations and thus had no incentive to create something good.
They did get paid -- if they had an official job, that is -- but they were paid a fixed sum per month regardless of the quality of music they produced.
Re:this doesn't make sence... (Score:2, Interesting)
Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man.
Communism is the reverse.
The Reason Programmers Turn Commie (Score:5, Interesting)
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.Re: Required response. (Score:3, Interesting)
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...
Re:Great quote from the article (Score:2, Interesting)
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 $0. In fact the GNU Manifesto specifically encourages charging for software (and/or support and warranties for software).
When RMS says that software should be "free", he means that you should be free to do whatever you like with any software you buy. Contrast the GNU GPL with the ridiculous shrink wrap licenses most proprietary software comes with. It's the GPL that best supports the idea of private property, i.e. you actually get to "own" your copy of GPL software!
Re: Required response. (Score:4, Interesting)
Ok, as an outspoken communist I NEED to slap you around a bit.
NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER Put Stalin in the same grouping as Lenin and Marx. EVER. Any true Communist is very outspoken about how much Stalin was not a communist (under Lenin's, Marx's, Trotski's, or anyone else even remotely credible's definition)
A MUCH more appropriate comment would have literally been:
If he says Linus is Lenin/Marx/etc. then he's Stalin by the same set of parameters.
Any time a topic like this comes up, I feel the need to somehow explain to people that Open Source IS a very Communist idea, and that's exactly why it's so great.
"From each according to their ability, to each according to their need."
Seems to kind of summarize the Open Source ideology, right? The people that can code, should. The people that can make graphics, should. The people that can only use the system and bitch when it breaks, should. And if everyone does this, everyone should get what they need out of it.
The quote is from Marx.
Think twice about saying that OSS isn't a very communist ideal, because it is.
Sorry, this turned from a reply into a rant in about 2 minutes.
Re:Gates is a communist (Score:2, Interesting)
The truth is if he/M$ hadn't been pressured by the quality of open source alternatives, we'd still be dealing with frequent BSODs and.... well, I guess we still have to deal with them, but they're aren't as frequent.
The point is, someone (or something) has to keep M$ honest and, with their penchant for unfair business practices, open source is one thing they can't wrap their grimy paws (or sceevy minds) around....yet.
Cheers,
- Hawkeye
Re:Gates The Spinner (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, being a few weeks away from my PhD (knock on wood) I'm reminded of the graphs of how university grades correlate with income. It's a rising curve up till just under the top when there's a sharp (or at least distinct) drop. Why? Because the people with the very highest grades can get admitted to graduate school and have a career in research instead of industry. All the while knowing they'll earn less money. Many of these people choose to.
Myself, I cut my salary by about a third going back to finish my PhD. Under Bill's model, that couldn't be done, while in actual fact it's not all that uncommon. I want to be able to do what I want to do, and make as much as I can doing it, obviously, but not to the deteriment of enjoying doing it. (And, no, I wont ever make back the money lost.)
There's a lot more to life than money and there's a lot of smart people out there who don't make as much money as they can because of choice.
Re: Required response. (Score:4, Interesting)
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!
Re:Bill Should Just STFU (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Bill didn't become rich and successful. He was born rich, and used mommy's IBM contacts to get his operating system put on IBM PCs. He then ran a monopolistic enterprise, and used illegal tactics (for which he has been convicted, if not punished) to go from being a millionaire by inheritence to a billionaire through monopolistic thuggary. In the process he foisted shoddy products on a captive public, held the technology back at least 15 years, and did irreperable harm to the industry (and countless thousands of lives, many of whome were far more innovative and creative thah he or his minions).
He continues to behave in the same manner, and it isn't helpful to the industry or the marketplace. The only people he is making the industry more inviting are holders of MSFT stock, and even that is arguable (the stock isn't going anywhere, and hasn't for a couple of years).
Not much to admire there, on any level.
Re:Here it is (Score:5, Interesting)
The DMCA lets producers shut down that right, and Bill's company is doing as they bid and enabling them to stop Fair Use.
WE are the customers too. He's enabled a runaround of copyright law. In my favorite phrase, "they broke the deal". Copyright for a certain term for them, accompanied by Fair Use for us. Now there is no term, and we can't use our Fair Use rights without breaking a sneaky little law. They broke the deal, not us.
They don't like Fair Use? Fine, we don't like copyright. Game on.
Re:Here it is (Score:3, Interesting)
I suppose next you are going to tell me that ESR is a communist as well?
All of this keeps reminding me of Gandhi. In colonial India, there was a salt monopoly granted by the British government. It was basically indirect taxation and a mockery of market capitalism. Gandhi proposed that people would venture to the sea and make their own salt using nothing but their bare hands [geocities.com]. For this he was incarcerated.
The monopolists of today would like to incarcerate you for doing a simple copy. They create artificial scarcity to better control and bend prices and profits in their favour, like in the past. This is not just reward for merit or work. I much prefer the Open Source market capitalism way of rewarding people per task accomplished, rather than granting imbecile monopolies for near perpetuity. You pay a contractor to build you a house. You get your house. You do not pay what is basically a tax to him for the house during his natural life, to his children, etc. This is essentially what copyright and patent law achieve.