Gates says: I Want To Sell Your Free Software

I was reading through the news this morning when I saw an interview with Bill Gates. I browsed through his comments on WinFS and how nifty metadata is, but I stopped skimming and read thoroughly when I saw that he had comments on free software.

“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.”

I’d like to nitpick over his use of the word commercial there but I’ll leave that for now. Instead I’ll say that the free software still benefits the taxpayer. It may be in the form of a free piece of software or in the form of taxes collected from services. The difference is that Gates can’t commoditize code that has touched software with a viral free license such as the GPL. That’s hardly breaking a cycle of benefits to the taxpayer.

Take a quick look through Linux Devices to see hardware vendors using viral free licenses, or google for linux support to get an idea of what startups make money off systems built upon tweaked GPL licensed applications. Of course there’s more to GPL licensed software than linux but it’s enough to get an inkling.

Mr. Gates would have more of a point if he tried to argue that students of schools he donated to should to stick to less viral licenses but his donations didn’t come with that particular string attached.