The Register: Gates: GPL Will Eat Your Economy, But BSD’s Cool

[ Thanks to Dom for this link.
]

“Gates was taking some pre-vetted (we presume) questions at last
week’s Government Leaders Conference in Seattle, and had been asked
about the strengths and weaknesses associated with the adoption of
Open Source in governments. He’d already taken a pop at this
subject in his introduction, and given that the questions overall
were fairly skewed in the direction of IT in developing countries,
it does rather look like Microsoft had decided it was going to ram
the message home hard to the people it sees as its future growth
area.

“Here’s what he had to say in the keynote:

“‘One thing that we get people discussing with us a lot is how
to create jobs around IT activity. And I think you will see some
countries who really believe in the capitalistic approach; that is,
that software should generate jobs, and government R&D should
generate jobs, so that government R&D should be done on a basis
that it can be commercialized.

“‘There’s a faction against that, the so-called general GPL
source license free software foundation, that says that these other
countries other than the U.S. should devote R&D dollars in the
so-called open approach, that means you can never commercialize
that software. And it is an interesting choice to deny — for a
country to deny itself the benefits of these high-paying jobs and
the kind of taxes that let countries fund their universities, and
fund general research that then goes to renew that pool of
commercial R&D. Clearly there’s an ecosystem there that has
worked extremely well in the United States, and has probably been
the unique thing that has let that push forward. And there is now a
recognition that it’s really a question of policy of allowing the
so-called capitalistic approach to win the day there…'”

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