Giving Gates the Benefit of Doubt

04-23-2008 | 08:25 PM EST

Okay, I'm going to give Bill Gates the benefit of the doubt on this one. Wired reported today that while speaking in Seattle on April 21 at the Institute for Systems Biology, Gates was asked if he would consider "open source uses" in health research when he begins full-time work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on July 1 of this year. Wired's account of his response follows:

"There's free software and then there's open source," he [Gates] suggested, noting that Microsoft gives away its software in developing countries. With open source software, on the other hand, "there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with."

Open source, he said, creates a license "so that nobody can ever improve the software," he claimed, bemoaning the squandered opportunity for jobs and business. (Yes, Linux fans, we're aware of how distorted this definition is.) He went back to the analogy of pharmaceuticals: "I think if you invent drugs, you should be able to charge for them," he said, adding with a shrug: "That may seem radical."

Wired, a lot of bloggers and countless other people have already jumped on this very strange take on open source software hindering software improvement. In general, it's understood that because the source code, the underlying guts of the software, are available for anyone to see and use, anybody can improve the software. What I think is really interesting about Gates' answer, though, is not so much his jab at open source but his conflation of "free" (as in cost) versus "free" (as in liberty) versus "open source" (as in something you can't charge money for).

At this point in time, I would have thought that there's already an overabundance of material explaining that the "free" in free/open source software released under the GPL refers to liberty — the ability for others to modify and share the software's source code. It has nothing do with cost. In fact, the Free Software Foundation covers this quite nicely in their FAQ, " Does the GPL allow me to sell copies of the program for money?". But, apparently some people have missed this discussion.

Ultimately, my real problem here is that if someone as smart as Bill Gates can't even understand that technical innovations, great software, human liberty, and getting paid aren't mutually exclusive, what hope do the rest of us poor schmucks have?

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