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Story: Gates: Restricting IP rights is tantamount to communism

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Brent Roberts is wrong.

"Gates is precisely correct: communism operates by the abolition of property rights."

Communism operates by the state control of property rights. It explicitly does NOT abolish property rights. Intellectual property is where the state confers the rights of this control onto other organisations.

Ergo Intellectual Property more closely resembles communism than does shared source.

Other common factors of Gates' desired outcome with communism:

- state controlled, monolithic organisations direct technology to suit their own purposes
- a de facto elite benefit to the detriment of the rest of society
- restricted choice for consumers
- competing products are effectively outlawed

Meanwhile Open Source more closely resembles capitalism:

- the 'market' decides which innovations are successful
- the 'market' allows for far more dynamic change than a centrally controlled system
- the 'market' makes much more efficient use of resources
- those that succeed are the best overall suppliers, and not just those that were first and managed to 'own' a whole technological invention / method

"Men need to have the right to dispose of the product of their effort (whether intellectual or otherwise) in order to survive."

Intellectual property rights can prevent those that independently arrive at a similar (or superior) solution from benefitting from their work.

"If US "greed" actually did not lead to innovation, then why has not a single company been able to create a product superior to Microsfot Office?"

Define 'superior'. OpenOffice is free. Value for Money wise, you can't get much better than that.

"without the backing of companies who have their IP rights protected, it will go nowhere."

A statement that is wholly false. IBM are just one of many companies showing that you can make money from using Open Source products.

The very fact that Gates is having to resort to ever more FUD such as this about Open Source shows pretty explicitly that it IS going somewhere. Even in its own SEC filings, Microsoft admits "The popularization of the open source movement continues to pose a significant challenge to the company's business model"

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