Don't listen to Bill Gates
This month, SAP's Shai Agassi referred to open-source software as "intellectual property socialism." In January, Bill Gates suggested that free-software developers are communists. A few years earlier, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer called the open-source operating system Linux "a cancer." Considering what these guys say in public, I wonder what dark words they utter in private—that al-Qaida uses open-source software to plot terrorist attacks?
The Web owes its existence to open source: Both the first text browser and the first graphical browser, Mosaic, were open-source projects. About 70 percent of the world's Web servers run on Apache, which powers some 50 million sites. If it weren't for free open-source software, companies like Amazon, Google, and Yahoo!—all of which run Linux—might never have got off the ground.
Gates, Ballmer, and Agassi say that open source is software socialism that stifles innovation. But it's the capitalists who have the tech world stuck in the mud. Microsoft's ham-fisted control over its software has done more to set back technological progress than a thousand open-source projects. When was the last time there was a truly revolutionary advance to the computer desktop that Microsoft dominates? By pocketing licensing fees, it has slowed entrepreneurship. By leveraging its monopoly over the desktop, it has prevented competitors from introducing products that would have offered an incentive for Redmond to innovate.
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