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<title>Bill Gates and Other Communists
- GNU Project - Free Software Foundation</title>
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<h2>Bill Gates and Other Communists</h2>
<p>by Richard Stallman</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Originally published in 2005 in
<a href="http://cnet.com/au/news/bill-gates-and-other-communists/">CNET
News.com</a>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Bill Gates discussed patents with CNET under the heading of
“<a href="/philosophy/not-ipr.html">intellectual
property</a>,” a term that covers many disparate
laws. He said anyone who won't give blanket support to all these laws
is a Communist. Since I'm not a Communist but I have criticized
software patents, I got to thinking this calumny might be aimed at
me.</p>
<p>The term “intellectual property” is too broad to have
one opinion about. It lumps together copyright law, patent law, and
various other laws, whose requirements and effects are entirely
different. So anyone using the term “intellectual
property” is typically either confused himself, or trying to
confuse you. Why does Mr. Gates lump these issues together? Let's
study the differences he sets aside.</p>
<p>Software developers are not up in arms against copyright law,
because the developer of a program holds the copyright on the program;
as long as the programmers wrote the code themselves, no one else has
a copyright on their code. There is no danger that strangers could
have a valid case of copyright infringement against them.</p>
<p>Patents are a different story. Software patents don't cover
programs or code; they cover ideas (methods, techniques, features,
algorithms, etc.). Developing a large program entails combining
thousands of ideas, and even if a few of them are new, the rest must
necessarily have come from other sources, such as programs the
developer has seen. If each of these ideas could be patented by
someone, every large program is likely to infringe hundreds of
patents. Developing a large program means laying oneself open to
hundreds of potential lawsuits. Software patents are a menace to
software developers, and to the users. Since patent law covers
execution of the program, the users can also be sued.</p>
<p>A few fortunate software developers avoid most of the danger.
These are the megacorporations, which typically have thousands of
patents each, and cross-license with each other. This gives them an
advantage over smaller rivals not in a position to do likewise.
That's why it is generally the megacorporations that lobby for
software patents.</p>
<p>Today's Microsoft is a megacorporation with thousands of patents.
Microsoft said in court that the main competition for MS Windows is
“Linux,” meaning the free software GNU/Linux operating
system. Leaked internal documents say that Microsoft aims to use
software patents to stop the development of GNU/Linux.</p>
<p>When Mr. Gates started hyping his solution to the problem of spam,
I suspected this was a plan to use patents to grab control of the net.
Sure enough, in 2004 Microsoft asked the IETF to approve a mail
protocol that Microsoft was trying to patent. The patent license
policy for this protocol was written to forbid free software entirely.
No program supporting this mail protocol could be released as free
software—not under the GNU GPL, or the MPL, or the Apache
license, or any other.</p>
<p>The IETF rejected Microsoft's protocol, but Microsoft said it would
try to convince major ISPs to use it anyway. Thanks to Mr. Gates, we
now know that an open Internet with protocols anyone can implement is
Communism; it was set up by that famous Communist agent, the US
Department of Defense.</p>
<p>With Microsoft's market clout, it can impose its choice of
programming system as a de-facto standard. Microsoft has already
patented some .NET implementation methods, raising the concern that
millions of users have been shifted to a government-issued Microsoft
monopoly.</p>
<p>But Capitalism means monopoly; at least, Gates-style Capitalism
does. People who think that everyone should be free to program, free
to write complex software, they are Communists, says Mr. Gates. But
these Communists have infiltrated even the Microsoft boardroom.
Here's what Bill Gates told Microsoft employees in 1991:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“If people had understood how patents would be granted when
most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the
industry would be at a complete stand-still today...A future start-up
with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the
giants choose to impose.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Mr. Gates' secret is out now—he too was a
“Communist,” he too recognized that software patents were
harmful, until Microsoft became one of these giants. Now Microsoft
aims to use software patents to impose whatever price it chooses on
you and me. And if we object, Mr. Gates will call us
“Communists.”</p>
<p>If you're not afraid of name calling, visit the
<a href="https://ffii.org"> Foundation for a Free Information
Infrastructure</a>, and join the fight against software patents in
Europe. We persuaded the European Parliament once—we even got
support from right-wing MEPs—and with your help we will do it
again.</p>
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<p>Copyright © 2005, 2015 Richard Stallman</p>
<p>This page is licensed under a <a rel="license"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">Creative
Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.</p>
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<p class="unprintable">Updated:
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$Date: 2015/10/06 13:43:20 $
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