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Bill Gates talks Vista and Linux

• Tags:
• Open Source,
• Linux,
• Windows Vista

Ina Fried CNET News.com

Published: 20 Nov 2006 13:48 GMT

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…that use Linux, applications that use Windows, and just have the VM manage which one needs more resource, which one is done, which one needs to be restarted.

We're also letting Novell give something that you get in the commercial model, but you rarely get otherwise, which is the indemnification, just like we always do with every copy of Windows. So we're pioneering some things here.

What about the role, though, for open-source software? Has your thinking changed? Is there a value that you see it bringing?
Well, let's distinguish: let's talk about free software. Free software has always been an important part of the software world, just like commercial software has been.

You know, BSD Unix was free [and] available. Many elements of it were taken by start-ups; they enhanced it. SendMail — they hired people, they created jobs, they paid taxes. So you have this incredibly wonderful thing that if free software works for people, they should use that.

Often, in terms of support and enhancement [and] ongoing relationship, people prefer commercial software, which, thanks to the volume of Windows PCs, is now a very low-price, high-volume type industry, which it wasn't with the mainframe.

People often choose commercial. Those commercial companies pay the taxes, create the jobs. The Government takes that and puts it back in the universities, and then there's more free software gets created. So it's this wonderful [virtuous] cycle, and I love that.

Now some people are trying to break that cycle by saying that you can never take things that taxpayer money helped create and use that in a start-up; [and] that if you do, if your code and theirs ever touches, you can never license it.

Anyway, we do tell people to be cautious about that. But free software, we think, is fine. Unix: we interoperate with it, we compete with it. [Regarding] the idea of open collaboration, letting our source code go out on more things and using the internet as a way of reaching out to developers, there are certainly best practices there — some of which we pioneered, some of which others pioneered — [that] we latched onto and, hopefully, will take to a new level. So it's a huge mix of things.

The only thing you see a disagreement on is that we think people should be careful about which licensing model they use, because it means you're breaking this cycle. Now [Free Software Foundation head Richard] Stallman, he is truly pure; unlike many people who sort of try to act that way, he's pure. In V3 [version three of the General Public License] he's going to really make it clear that there's the world of "can never be [commercialised]" — nobody can ever make money on it, you know, build web services or things. At least he's pure.

So that's going to be harder to work with?
Who knows? I don't know. That's his world. The GPL is. The free software world is way, way bigger than that, and that will always be there. That's a non-controversial thing that we love. We make some of our stuff free, some of our stuff we charge for. It all seems to have worked out so far.

There's obviously one other big product for the holidays in terms of things that you guys make — XBox 360. You did get the year's head start this time. There still seems to be pretty strong critical acclaim and demand for PlayStation 3. How do you see that?
I wouldn't change positions with them in a million years. I mean, we know what it's like to be a year late. We feel great about the position that we're in. And, of course, they're going to sell a lot in Japan.

You know, Sony can make 80,000 bricks, and people would buy them. So the real competition — you're going to see the impact of our innovation and all the momentum we have in Christmas 2007. This Christmas, the story is: XBox 360 is going to sell super-well, and they'll sell the rounding error amounts they can make.

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