Bill Gates Comments on GPL and Linux

JONATHAN MURRAY: You touched upon this in your opening comments, but several of our delegates have asked questions about Open Source. As some countries have recently adopted Open Source for some aspects of their IT operations in government, and from your perspective what are the strengths and weaknesses of that approach?

BILL GATES: Well, there are many different aspects here. One question is: Do you need the source code of an operating system as a user of that operating system? That is, should you be paying your people to study the intricacies of how the operating system is built and stuff like that? And the basic answer is no. That's something that for a few percent of the price of the PC you can buy a commercial operating system, where all the work of testing it, supporting it, delivering it, is included for a few percent of that price of the PC.

For customers who want source code -- universities, large customers -- we provide that. But 90-some percent of that time, that's more a -- okay, it's nice, I have it, you know, should I ever need it. That's fair. So source availability is not the big issue. That's -- you have got source availability from us and others, and it's not much needed in any case.

Then you get to the issue of who is going to be the most innovative. You know, will it be capitalism, or will it be just people working at night? There's always been a free software world. And you should understand Microsoft thinks free software is a great thing. Software written in universities should be free software. But it shouldn't be GPL software. GPL software is like this thing called GNU/Linux, where you can never commercialize anything around it; that is, it always has to be free. And, you know, that's just a philosophy. Some said philosophy wasn't around much anymore, but it's still there. And so that's where we part company. We say there should be an eco-system so something like VSB, which is a free form of UNIX, but it's not - -doesn't have this GPL with it, versus GNU/Linux which does -- there's a big contrast. A government can fund research work on BFP [sic], UNIX, and still have commercial companies in their country start off around that type of work. You know, technology policies like biotech -- you only -- if your universities are doing work that can be commercialized, you will have IT jobs in your country. And if they are not, then fine, just say that farming is your thing, or whatever it is. All the taxes will be paid by those guys or something -- I don't know. And the farmers will go home at night and work on the source code. (Laughter.)