To pay so much attention to Bill Gates' retirement is missing the point. What really matters is not Gates, nor Microsoft, but the unethical system of restrictions that Microsoft, like many other software companies, imposes on its customers.
That statement may surprise you, since most people interested in computers have strong feelings about Microsoft. Businessmen and their tame politicians admire its success in building an empire over so many computer users.
Many outside the computer field credit Microsoft for advances which it only took advantage of, such as making computers cheap and fast, and convenient graphical user interfaces.
Gates' philanthropy for health care for poor countries has won some people's good opinion. The LA Times reported that his foundation spends five to 10% of its money annually and invests the rest, sometimes in companies it suggests cause environmental degradation and illness in the same poor countries.
Many computerists specially hate Gates and Microsoft. They have plenty of reasons.
'Solicit funds'
Microsoft persistently engages in anti-competitive behaviour, and has been convicted three times. George W Bush, who let Microsoft off the hook for the second US conviction, was invited to Microsoft headquarters to solicit funds for the 2000 election.
Many users hate the "Microsoft tax", the retail contracts that make you pay for Windows on your computer even if you won't use it.
In some countries you can get a refund, but the effort required is daunting.
There's also the Digital Restrictions Management: software features designed to "stop" you from accessing your files freely. Increased restriction of users seems to be the main advance of Vista.
'Gratuitous incompatibilities'
Then there are the gratuitous incompatibilities and obstacles to interoperation with other software. This is why the EU required Microsoft to publish interface specifications.
This year Microsoft packed standards committees with its supporters to procure ISO approval of its unwieldy, unimplementable and patented "open standard" for documents. The EU is now investigating this.
These actions are intolerable, of course, but they are not isolated events. They are systematic symptoms of a deeper wrong which most people don't recognise: proprietary software.
Microsoft's software is distributed under licenses that keep users divided and helpless. The users are divided because they are forbidden to share copies with anyone else. The users are helpless because they don't have the source code that programmers can read and change.
If you're a programmer and you want to change the software, for yourself or for someone else, you can't.
If you're a business and you want to pay a programmer to make the software suit your needs better, you can't. If you copy it to share with your friend, which is simple good-neighbourliness, they call you a "pirate".
'Unjust system'
Microsoft would have us believe that helping your neighbour is the moral equivalent of attacking a ship.
The most important thing that Microsoft has done is to promote this unjust social system.
Gates is personally identified with it, due to his infamous open letter which rebuked microcomputer users for sharing copies of his software.
It said, in effect, "If you don't let me keep you divided and helpless, I won't write the software and you won't have any. Surrender to me, or you're lost!"
'Change system'
But Gates didn't invent proprietary software, and thousands of other companies do the same thing. It's wrong, no matter who does it.
Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, and the rest, offer you software that gives them power over you. A change in executives or companies is not important. What we need to change is this system.
That's what the free software movement is all about. "Free" refers to freedom: we write and publish software that users are free to share and modify.
We do this systematically, for freedom's sake; some of us paid, many as volunteers. We already have complete free operating systems, including GNU/Linux.
Our aim is to deliver a complete range of useful free software, so that no computer user will be tempted to cede her freedom to get software.
In 1984, when I started the free software movement, I was hardly aware of Gates' letter. But I'd heard similar demands from others, and I had a response: "If your software would keep us divided and helpless, please don't write it. We are better off without it. We will find other ways to use our computers, and preserve our freedom."
In 1992, when the GNU operating system was completed by the kernel, Linux, you had to be a wizard to run it. Today GNU/Linux is user-friendly: in parts of Spain and India, it's standard in schools. Tens of millions use it, around the world. You can use it too.
Gates may be gone, but the walls and bars of proprietary software he helped create remain, for now.
Dismantling them is up to us.
Richard Stallman is the founder of the Free Software Foundation. You can copy and redistribute this article under the Creative Commons Noderivs license.
Talkback
Richard is an ideologist, some might say socialist, capitalism has existed in one form or another since time began.
Microsoft as it has grown and like any big corporate can become aggressive to survive to feed itself. Just think of AT&T, it was broken up for being an aggressive monopoly and IBM nearly got broken up for its business practices.
Every industry has it's story to tell, just look at the Retail, Textile and Oil industries.
But people did have a choice they did not have to buy Microsoft products. Richard could argue that Microsoft squashed a lot of competitors but companies did not have to buy their products. To be honest some of their products have been better than the competition and others worst. Typically of any company.
It is all down to marketing and how well the advert convinces people to buy the product, no one is twisting their arm to buy.
I am not being naive about Microsoft, I am no fan of theirs, I have been involved in computing for 30 years and have seen it all.
Microsoft has provided employeement for hundreds of thousands of people and many more by other companies reselling their products or by providing add ons.
Free software is a slow growing cancer within the industry as it is altering the way people obtain software, it is becoming more of vehicle for services and hardware. No wonder IBM, Sun and others want to get behind it, they want to sell more hardware and services on the back of other peoples free efforts. Where is the ethics in that Richard?
Some might say Redhat has grown into a monoply for Linux on the back of non-paid people. They have not had to fund the developement of Linux from day one.
Richard says that free is a benefit for everybody but what about the companies who are trying to provide a living for their employees and are now having to compete with companies who are selling 'Free' software. Surley this is anti-competitive and should be stopped. I cannot walk into McDonalds and ask for a 'free' Big Mac!
At a time when there are fewer students applying for Computer Science courses at Universities I can see that free software will eventually be the major reason reducing the numbers again. When they finish their degree where will all the software companies be to give them a job if free software continues to gain traction?
Sorry Richard, you will be known for the person killed the software industry and not the father of free software.
If I go into a store and buy a new computer, I am going to have to buy it with windows pre-installed, unless I buy a MAC. I'm spending my money, but I don't have a choice of buying this computer without an OS. Microsoft has the manufacturers and the resellers locked in by contract to only sell Microsoft products. If I get home and I format the drive and install Linux I have still paid for windows and it is counted as a sale for Microsoft, and I am considered a windows user because I paid for a license. I don't own the software, as Microsoft tells me how I can use it, I only have a license to use their software. Call it anything you want to this is not right. I downloaded my copies of Linux and am running it on 3 machines, but I am allowed to put it on as many machines as I want. I can make copies and give to as many people as I want. I can remaster the CD and personalize it for myself or anyone else. Face it, Linux is the future, and I think Microsoft is extremely afraid of what is coming.
What still dumfounds me is that the major inertia preventing a general migration away from Microsoft is corporate unwillingness to stop using the worst word processor on the market because of the fear of the learning curve involved in the change. In fact the ease of use of say open office would pay back so quickly that people would look back in astonishment at word's quirkiness.
I wish I could say that the open office spread sheet was as good as Excel (it is getting there, and using it instead would be a small price to pay for the other advantages of open source). However the thing which Excel does do is demonstrate just how bad word is: the GUI and functionality of the drawing package is identical but the implementation in Excel works whereas in word it starts to fall over as soon as the drawing gets moderately complex.
The only cancer that has grown is the limitations placed on users by business not interested in competition, and the lack of real innovation that has happened in the IT industry for the last 20 years.
Computing grew out of cooperation, sharing, coolaboration, making ones work freely available to others so that others could build on your work, and that you could build further on their work. Without this free sharing, computers today would still occupy huge rooms and be horrible expensive things that only governments could afford.
Today, companies do as much as possible to prevent competition, the very seed that forces improvements in products, which is to the advantage of the user. Software Patents are part of this cancer.
You talk about Microsoft providing hundreds of thousands of jobs. Linux and Free Software, shared on the basis of GNU, has provided millions of jobs around the world, and made computing reachable for people who would otherwise have the financial means to get to it. These people get jobs because they have the possibility to learn something they otherwise would never have the opportunity to.
Microsoft is one big company, there are hundreds of thousands of small companies out there that have built their business based on the open sharing that Stallman has promoted. You can't simply discount these because they base their business on a different principle.
As for the big companies, Sun, IBM, and so on, they have been forced to change their entire business model, to provide cheaper hardware that supports more than just their own propretry OS. In fact, hardware prices from these manufactures has plummeted drastically. The competition that free software has brought in forced them to innovate, and to advance their technological offerings to customers, and to make their products compatible with the products from competing offerings. Their other option was to hold on to the old proprietary way of business, and die a slow, painful death.
Why are there less computing students? To lay the blame at the foot of free software is to be blind to a number of facts. Worldwide the number of IT students is sky rocketing. It's just not increasing in countries that restrict the use of software and and restrict users, in those countries it's decreasing. In other countries, like India, the IT student numbers are rocketing, and there free software is much more prevalent than proprietary software.
The IT bubble in the west burst a bit a few years ago, when managers realised that the future is not all in the internet, and not all in IT. There are other markets out there, and consumers don't just sit in front of computers, they do sports, go on holidays, visit friends, and for that you don't need IT. And as for your big mac argument, that's a comparison between chalk and cheese, read irrelevant.
IT will grow on both models, it's just that with the open source model on which computing was originally built is coming back because it can grow more productively and innovatively on this model.
I think you slightly exaggerate when you say that open source provides millions of jobs.
I do not know many Open Source companies that actually make a profit so how can they provide millions of jobs!
If you mean there are plenty of developers writing open source code then that I can believe, but are they working for free.
Computing did not grow out of cooperation etc. as you put it. It grew because companies realized that they could become more competitive. Intel was one of the biggest reasons that computers became a commodity and the likes of Apple made it interesting.
I dont know where you get your stats from but from official figures in the UK and the USA the number IT/Computing graduates are dropping.
No wonder India and China are jumping on open source it allows them to get access to software for free and help them become more competitive against western companies. I wonder if China will put anything back into open source, doubt it.
Industry does change and always will change but it normally does not shoot itself in the foot. I have been the IT industry a while and seen it all and many times I have predicated which technology would succeed (you might say I have been lucky).
I do not see the money being made from open source that will encourage the next generation of IT stars unless big business and governments fund it and that is highly unlikely.
IT is an industry I enjoy making a living out of. I hope I am wrong about open source it remains to be seen.
On another note, its a hot day so I am off for some R&R and a beer!
Open Source does provide millions of jobs around the world, look at the IT boom in India, Eastern Block countries, China, ... You may not know about the companies, most probably because they're not as prominent as Microsoft, but they're there, tens of thousands of small companies with a handfull of people, and thousands of bigger companies with more people.
Your comment that computing did not grow out of cooperation shows that you do not consider the early pioneers of computing as being important. They all had to work together, despite their different employers, to produce something usable. Without that sharing, with a proprietary non sharing model, that usability would never have come to what helped the jump from Mainframe to the future. Commodity computing? That happend way after the original cooperation that built computing which helped make commodity computing possible.
Quote: "... official figures in the UK and the USA ..." and "No wonder India and China are jumping on open source ..." You've confirmed what I wrote - that in countries where Software Patents and anti competitive, non sharing practices reign, the IT industry is suffering a reduction, and in other countries where freely sharing software is valued, IT is booming, and that's where the jobs are going to.
I have been in IT almost as long as you, and have been frustrated about how IT has constantly shot itself in the foot with closed systems, anti competitive practices, proprietary protocols, incompatible and non competitive products, and soaring costs that serve only to feed the wallets of big managers. Where the money in IT is to be made in the future is shifting away from the old user restrictive model to a new model of sharing. The money is no longer going only into the managers wallets, it's going into the developers wallets, where it belongs.
The money for the future is there, it's just that as is usual in a time of change that it's not yet clear to those holding on to an obsoleted model where everything for the future fits into place.