Bill Gates on Open Source software

["Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

The following is clipped from a recent interview of Bill Gates, in which
he was asked about the future of Open Source software.  His comments
eerily echo some that have appeared on this list re Open Access:

"The industry will always be a mix of free and commercial software. So
there will be a balance between those. I think that we are going to have a
lot of both. There are some zealots that think there should be no software
jobs, that we should all, like, cut hair during the day and write code at
night.  Should you take some of those extreme views, I think it's easy to
say that's not right. There are things like compatibility and 24-hour
support and taking big leaps like IPTV or speech recognition. The
painstaking work over a decade that you have to do, that costs hundreds of
millions or even billions of dollars. That's the commercial side. It's
good at hiring people and selling licenses and taking the risks that go
with that.

"I've always believed in low-cost, high-volume. It should be a cost that's 
so obvious that you should spend, because it saves you on personnel time, 
hardware, communications costs, which are gigantic when compared to the 
price of packaged software. That cost is almost a rounding error. The value 
you get out of the system is a lot larger than that. I don't just believe 
in a single model. There's a lot of neat things that can be done. But I 
don't think that someone who completely gives up license fees is ever going 
to have a substantial R&D budget and do the hard things, the things too 
hard to do in a university environment. But that's OK. There will be a 
commercial software industry, hopefully, with companies that take the 
long-term approach and make the investments that drive those new 
breakthroughs."  [end of Gates quotation]

Joe Esposito