[DMCA-Activists] Stallman: Bill Gates and Other Communists

[Seth Johnson]

> http://news.com.com/Bill+Gates+and+other+communists/2010-1071_3-5576230.html


Bill Gates and Other Communists


By Richard Stallman

February 15, 2005, 3:55 AM PT

 

When CNET News.com asked Bill Gates about software patents, he
shifted the subject to "intellectual property," blurring the
issue with various other laws.

Then he said anyone who won't give blanket support to all these
laws is a communist. Since I'm not a communist but I have
criticized software patents, I got to thinking this might be
aimed at me.

When someone uses the term "intellectual property," typically
he's either confused himself, or trying to confuse you. The term
is used to lump together copyright law, patent law and various
other laws, whose requirements and effects are entirely
different. Why is Mr. Gates lumping these issues together? Let's
study the differences he has chosen to obscure.

Software developers are not up in arms against copyright law,
because the developer of a program holds the copyright on the
program; as long as the programmers wrote the code themselves, no
one else has a copyright on their code. There is no danger that
strangers could have a valid case of copyright infringement
against them.

Patents are a different story. Software patents don't cover
programs or code; they cover ideas (methods, techniques,
features, algorithms, etc.). Developing a large program entails
combining thousands of ideas, and even if a few of them are new,
the rest needs must have come from other software the developer
has seen. If each of these ideas could be patented by someone,
every large program would likely infringe hundreds of patents.
Developing a large program means laying oneself open to hundreds
of potential lawsuits. Software patents are menaces to software
developers, and to the users, who can also be sued.

A few fortunate software developers avoid most of the danger.
These are the megacorporations, which typically have thousands of
patents each, and cross-license with each other. This gives them
an advantage over smaller rivals not in a position to do
likewise. That's why it is generally the megacorporations that
lobby for software patents.

Today's Microsoft is a megacorporation with thousands of patents.
Microsoft said in court that the main competition for MS Windows
is "Linux," meaning the free software GNU/Linux operating system.
Leaked internal documents say that Microsoft aims to use software
patents to stop the development of GNU/Linux.

When Mr. Gates started hyping his solution to the problem of
spam, I suspected this was a plan to use patents to grab control
of the Net. Sure enough, in 2004 Microsoft asked the IETF
(Internet Engineering Task Force) to approve a mail protocol that
Microsoft was trying to patent. The license policy for the
protocol was designed to forbid free software entirely. No
program supporting this mail protocol could be released as free
software -- not under the GNU GPL (General Public License), or
the MPL (Mozilla Public License), or the Apache license, or
either of the BSD licenses, or any other.

The IETF rejected Microsoft's protocol, but Microsoft said it
would try to convince major ISPs to use it anyway. Thanks to Mr.
Gates, we now know that an open Internet with protocols anyone
can implement is communism; it was set up by that famous
communist agent, the U.S. Department of Defense.

With Microsoft's market clout, it can impose its choice of
programming system as a de-facto standard. Microsoft has already
patented some .Net implementation methods, raising the concern
that millions of users have been shifted to a government-issue
Microsoft monopoly.

But capitalism means monopoly; at least, Gates-style capitalism
does. People who think that everyone should be free to program,
free to write complex software, they are communists, says Mr.
Gates. But these communists have infiltrated even the Microsoft
boardroom. Here's what Bill Gates told Microsoft employees in
1991:

"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most
of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the
industry would be at a complete standstill today...A future
start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay
whatever price the giants choose to impose."

Mr. Gates' secret is out now -- he too was a "communist;" he,
too, recognized that software patents were harmful -- until
Microsoft became one of these giants. Now Microsoft aims to use
software patents to impose whatever price it chooses on you and
me. And if we object, Mr. Gates will call us "communists."

If you're not afraid of name-calling, visit ffii.org (the
Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure), and join the
fight against software patents in Europe. We persuaded the
European Parliament once -- even right-wing MEPs are
"communists," it seems -- and with your help we will do it again.


biography

Richard Stallman is president of the Free Software Foundation as
well as chief GNUisance of the GNU Project.


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