Hello folks,
I found it important to comment on Bill Gates's statement to free software. Here is the entire blogpost as a copy. If you like it, you are free to share it.
" <CIT> Thank God for commercial software. It actually funds salaries, gives people jobs. And thank God for free software, it lets people get things out there, you can play around, build on. The two work very well in an ecosystem - Bill Gates </CIT>
What a pile of fraudulent praise.
The problem here is that Mr. Gates is making a difference between commercial and free software, as if the advantages of free software could be justified on an economic scale. In fact, most free software is available gratis today, which is the consequence of a market where the duplication cost (copying) is almost zero*.
So, does Mr. Gates conciously lie to you? Kind of, because as soon as you read between the lines he is making a third, hidden statement through his opposition - a clever stroke to say something while you're not actually saying it. Each of his statements is absolutely valid: Commercial software funds salaries and gives people jobs. Meanwhile, it is also true that free software lets people play around and build on.
There are two more truths: There is also a yet substantial and growing amount of free software developed and used in commercial fields, which also funds salaries and gives jobs. Plus, people can also play around and build on proprietary software, which is difficult but not impossible for software for which the developers did not release the source code, but more realistically in cases where developers released their source code under a non-free license. So while you technically can play around and build on that kind of software, you are committing illegal action (as regarded by law) as soon as you start to enhance or run it as you like - or whatever silly restriction there may be.
Hence, Mr. Gates' statement is extremely harmful to free software, not only because he is omitting the nasty truth, but at the same time he is implicitly giving people the false impression that commercial success is unconditionally bound to be a feature to proprietary software.
* Well, it is not exactly zero. If you buy free software on CD, making a copy requires you to pay the physical medium and the cost of actually making a copy. If you get your copy over the internet, you have to pay for an internet connection and eventually someone has to pay for the server, both the server itself and the running expenses of that server."
Source: http://cybercatalyst.net/tainted-words-from-bill-gates/
Greets Jacob
On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 12:40:50PM +0200, Jacob Dawid wrote:
<CIT> Thank God for commercial software. It actually funds salaries, gives people jobs. And thank God for free software, it lets people get things out there, you can play around, build on. The two work very well in an ecosystem - Bill Gates </CIT>
For me this "play around" stroke on another nerve. I often had heard "Free Software may be a nice toy, but we need real professional software." I think that is what Bill Gates really wanted to express with it.