Bill Has Spoken And We Are Commies

I guess I am part of the commies Bill Gates spoke about during an interview on news.com. I am not entirely sure the context in which Bill made this statement, but I do however support Copyleft and GPL. So, if that makes me apart of the commies, then so be it. I bought a t-shirt just so I could be appropriately identified as such. A nice fellow designed the logo, and then a another nice fellow decided to sell some shirts with the logo on’em for dirt cheap. I caught wind of the attire from Preshrunk.

If that wasn’t enough to spice things up another nice fellow threw together this logo . I’m sure we might see a kaki t-shirt from this sooner than later. Umm…hail commies.

1.   #1 Comment Posted by eddie wilson on Jan 8, 02:34 AM
   Im not sure if I understand this right, and someone please explain it to me, but doesn’t Bill Gate’s statements mean that he does support Intellectual Property Rights?
   
   “They don’t think that those incentives should exist.”
   
   “Intellectual property is the incentive system for the products of the future.”
2.   #2 Comment Posted by Nathan Logan on Jan 12, 12:09 PM
   Eddie,
   
   Yes, he does support intellectual property rights. He doesn’t want to release the source to MS operating systems or other products because MS has put the time, effort, and money into developing them. If they do not have a monopoly on the product that cost them time and money to develop, he is arguing that they would have had no incentive to develop the product in the first place (and would not have incentive to do the same in the future).
   
   The ‘other side’ (those selling and wearing the shirts, presumably) believes that MS software should be open source so that the entire community can not only benefit from ideas that went into it, but also so that the product can be bettered (the whole thousands of heads are better than 1 idea).
   
   Although I like Copyleft and GPL for the reasons just mentioned (sharing of ideas and a community committed to furthering a given project, standard, or idea), I think Bill’s right. It just doesn’t work for a business. There are very few companies that can turn the open source paradigm into profit due to the very nature of open source (it’s free, freely changed, and freely distributed).
   
   I appreciate the open source idea and wish it could work, but frankly, I haven’t seen a model that would realistically allow it in the business world.
   
   If I was Bill (or a musician or artist or anyone else producing ‘original’ work), I’d be saying the exact same thing.
   
   But I do like the shirts – they are cheap and look pretty sweet.