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[Paul Jones <pjones AT metalab.unc.edu>]

From the Microsoft stockholders meeting.
http://www.microsoft.com/msft/speech/smeet/shareholdermeeting01.htm
During question time, a wise questioner asks:

QUESTION: It appears to me that the open source movement is gaining
momentum, and as I understand it the key to success of a software product
involves efficiently building an ecosystem of developers and users,
resellers, and so forth. Doesn't the open source model a more efficient
paradigm for building such a community around your products, and isn't
perhaps Microsoft maybe on the wrong side of that trend of long-term?

MR. GATES: Let me start out, really the reason that you see open source
there at all is because we came in and said there should be a platform
that's identical with millions and millions of machines, and the bios of
that should be open to everybody to use, and all the extensibility should
be there. And so it was very predictable that once we had gotten the PC
going, and going and gotten hundreds of millions of machines out there,
that it had always been sort of free software and the universities would
flourish and there would be more of that. We certainly accept free
software as part of the software ecosystem. In fact, there's a very
virtuous cycle where people do free things, some people find that
adequate, sometimes companies will take that work and turn it into
commercial products, those companies will hire people, pay taxes. And so
you see the free software and the commercial software existing together.

There is a particular approach that breaks the cycle called the GPL that
is not worth getting into today, but I don't think there is much awareness
about how so-called free software foundations designed that to break that
cycle.

In terms of getting people excited about software and building communities
around them, yes, that is a key to success. Nobody has done that more
effectively than we have with Windows. Are there ways that we can do that
better? Are there aspects of this where we're actually learning from all
our different competitors out there? I think it's fair to say yes.

In the pre-software vision is that there would be no jobs in the software
industry, there would be no testers, no engineers, no taxes paid, or
anything of that notion. So I certainly don't agree with the full sort of
free software foundation view that there should be no jobs in this area,
and that the kind of commercial advances and risk taking that we've been
able to do you can't get that, you can't get things like speech
recognition on a tablet computer coming out of that kind of a paradigm.
You can get things that follow along, you can get some smaller software,
and so we embraced the idea of the free software paradigm and the
commercial software paradigm moving forward in really a self-reinforcing
way.

MR. BALLMER: I just want to add one thing, echo what Bill said, but
encourage you to go to our web site. If there's a key learning for us, we
can't have free software, it's kind of inconsistent with the goals of most
people in the room. We recognize it, it probably doesn't fit in most of
these people's mind's eye, so we're not going to embrace that. But there
is something about the way the community works to support itself which is
brilliant, and which we've done many good things, but we think we've seen
some good things sort of in the Linux, et cetera, world, and I encourage
you to go up to Microsoft.com and check out our community areas. It's an
area where we have sort of massively mobilized. It's still in the early
phases, but we are massively mobilizing to try to stimulate communities,
support communities, and really, if you will, borrow one from their
playbook.

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                             Paul Jones
                    "Gort! Klaatu barada nikto!"
http://www.ibiblio.org/pjones/ at the Site Formerly Known As MetaLab.unc.edu
  pjones AT ibiblio.org   voice: (919) 962-7600     fax: (919) 962-8071
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