Bonum Certa Men Certa

Bill Gates Mocks Free Software by Substituting “Proprietary” With “Commercial”

Airplane
According to Gates, non-Free software is "747" and Linux is "OpenSource Airplane"



Summary: Same old FUD patterns found in Microsoft's internal discussions

OUR next Comes vs Microsoft 'smoking gun', namely Exhibit PX07191 (2002) [PDF], is an E-mail from Bill Veghte, which contains other messages. Jim Allchin writes to fellow Windows managers like Chris Jones, Will Poole, and Brian Valentine about Longhorn (to be Windows Vista) and passes Bill Gates' words to a few others.



It is no secret that Microsoft loves schmoozing the press, so Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer had a dinner "with about 20 leading editors in Las Vegas."

Here is a funny one from Bill Gates:

We have to be careful to just say "we are doing the software to allow for this" rather than saying "we are going to make this happen to undermine cable and DSL pricing"


That's a classic.

There is no mention anywhere of Apple, but GNU/Linux preys on Gates' mind. We showed this earlier today using another antitrust exhibit. Gates writes:

What is our view of Linux? I point out that Linux like Unix is not a single thing - it is many different systems that are not the same. The point that Linux is diverse is not one we are good at making. People who develop for RedHat Linux need to test for UnitedLinux. When people like SGI or HP enhance Linux you don’t get all those enhancements in one version -in fact just like Unix each company wants to have something that it does better and even though some pieces of source code are there it doesn’t mean that the pieces are integrated and tested together. 1 explain how the commercial model allows for testing and binary upwards compatibility.

What about Linux price? I explain how Linux plus Websphere is more expensive than Windows equivalent and Linux plus Oracle is more expensive than Windows equivalent. I explain how the richness of the platform that we sell for $500 just keeps getting richers - directory, certificates, app server, etc etc. I explain that for most projects the licensed OS is only a few percent of what people spend and getting the right platform can save much more than a few percent on the development, management, richness of the app, hardware flexibility, communications cost etc.. I say that is places where customers are very price sensitive like Education we have had special prices that are 15% of normal and we will keep those prices low enough to get very broad usage in education.

What about platform innovation - doesn’t Linux have more people doing cool stuff?. I gave the analogy of someone saying that the new 747 competitor is being designed by an OpenSource Airplane design group. The interdependencies and need for parallel coordinated innovation requires a commercial model with risk taking. A new 747 can’t be done by a non commercial model. I say that an opensource model could take an old design and have people do cloning and modest improvements on various aspects independently. I give tablet as an example of something that required changes in many aspects on the system -getting Office to do its work and handwriting recognition and new platform capabilities. I say that Linux is not where advances like great games, or tablet or management have come or will come despite the openness. I explain the things like community involvement we have learned from Linux. I go back to the argument above that we are forced in to do big advances or else or installed base will have "share" but there will be no revenue for us. I talk about Stallman’s view that there shouldn’t be jobs doing commercial software and how that would cut off a whole range of innovations that have come from the commercial world.


Notice how he mixes the terms "commercial" and "proprietary". This is not an accident, he is deliberately confusing them to imply that Free software cannot be used commercially. This is classic FUD and it is valuable to see where it may originate from. We have begun assembling some other examples of GPL FUD that comes out of Gates' own mouth.

He then goes on to talking about Vista and Xbox Live, but watch this bit about India:

What about Microsoft in india? Lots of discussion about my trip there and how Indian companies like Infosys and Wipro are growing and proving to be effective.


Shortly we will write about Microsoft's latest cost-cutting plan and neglect of American workforce. It keeps getting more serious and even people in Seattle are nervous.

Another last GNU/Linux gem:

The old chestnut about us not innovating will die. There will still be the edge of "Wow they are big and smart and no one is gaining on them except perhaps the Linux model".


GNU/Linux is certainly a recurring theme, which confirms that it is Microsoft's main concern. The full exhibit lies below as plain text.




Appendix: Comes vs. Microsoft - exhibit PX07191, as text










From: Bill Veghte Sent: Thursday, November 21,2002 7:58 AM To: Bob Kelly Directs, David Thompson (NT); Jim Hebert, Katy Hunter Subject: FW: Discussions with the press

Please do not forward but the comments in here are excellent.

I do want to have in the notes of the R8 deck a price comparison table that he notes (Peter can you have Melba do this).

-----Original Message-----

From: Jim Allchin Sent: Wednesday, November 20, 2002 11:51 AM To: Chris Jones (WINDOWS); Will Poole; Brian Valentine; Rogers Weed; Bob Kelly; Bill Veghte; S. Somasegar; Mike Nash; David Thompson (NT); Dan Neault Subject: FW: Discussions with the press

worth reading.. I think the comments are quite good in a number of ways.

We should consider including the pricing comparison he does below in the RD deck.

Also I think I need to work with him on the essence of LH. What he describes is an important aspect, but not how I would personally spin. Maybe it is ok for now, but it must change over time.

jim

From: Bill Gates Sent: Wednesday, November 20, 2002 1_0::[7 AM To: Senior Leadership Team Co: Orlando Ayala; Kevin Johnson; Jean-Philippe Courtois; Eric Rudder; Sanjay Parthasarathy; Paul Flessner

I wrote up the comments below in summarizing a dinner Steve and I had with about 20 leading editors in Las Vegas Monday night.

Please look them over because I am very interested in whether the way I am positioning things is consistent with all of you. Also you will find some ways of discussing competition that I have had to refine over a period of dozens on interviews boring in on those issues.

What is the state of innovation? I gave them a framework where chip, screen, Wifi, storage, camera imagers and optic fiber advances are full speed ahead in a continuous fashion and those things enable software and scenario advances in a bit of a discontinuous fashion because you need software platforms at critical mass and user penetrarion at critical mass before new scenarios have their full impact.

What is MSFT’s view of mesh networks? I got this question a lot more from press than I expected. I made it clear we are doing amazing software work that is a necessary part of this. I need to talk with Craig/Pierre/Tren more about our public message on this. We have to be careful to just say "we are doing the software to allow for this" rather than saying "we are going to make this happen to undermine cable and DSL pricing"

What is Microsoff’s role in the enterprise? I got to talk about scalability progress and the longer track to get full credibility for management and reliability and security but explained how serious we are about it and how the web services platform will surprise people by how it advances these issues.

4/14/2003

Plaintiff's Exhibit 7191 Comes V. Microsoft

MS-CC-Sun 000000095114 CONFIDENTIAL

What is Microsoll’s biggest competitor? I think it is CRITICAL to point out to people that the biggest competitor is our installed base of software. If we don’t improve Office and users don’t want the new version then people get to use it forever without paying us anything. Competing with the real Office that doesn’t wear out is tougher than competing with an inferior clone. Our innovation has to reach the threshold where people not only want to license the new version but install it and learn it and deal with any issues it creates.

What is Microsoft’s relationship with IBM? I point to our behaviour relative to Webserices standards as a huge example of new responsible leadership. Rather than implementing these protocols and then taking them to a standards group or keeping them proprietary we work with competitors including IBM and define them together and then both implement in parallel. This some of Microsoft’s and IBM’s finest work and it is laying the foundation for the dreams of the Internet like Ecommerce to become a reality. I also explain we have a good relationship with them on hardware where they did a nice 16-way server and we meet with them to discuss having the best Windows platforms. I say the competition between Exchange and Notes and Windows.net and Websphere are healthy competition for the customer and because of our pure software focus we have generally done a better job listening and advances software products than IBM (at least off the mainframe).

Will people ever move off of the Mainframe? I don’t say anything radical on this but l say many customers are moving a lot of cycles off today including the Danske Bank example I used in the keynote. However getting people to move the "master account record" out of CICS/IMS on the mainframe will take time. However if you think about this decade the use of mainframes will go down a lot.

What is our view of Linux? I point out that Linux like Unix is not a single thing - it is many different systems that are not the same. The point that Linux is diverse is not one we are good at making. People who develop for RedHat Linux need to test for UnitedLinux. When people like SGI or HP enhance Linux you don’t get all those enhancements in one version -in fact just like Unix each company wants to have something that it does better and even though some pieces of source code are there it doesn’t mean that the pieces are integrated and tested together. 1 explain how the commercial model allows for testing and binary upwards compatibility.

What about Linux price? I explain how Linux plus Websphere is more expensive than Windows equivalent and Linux plus Oracle is more expensive than Windows equivalent. I explain how the richness of the platform that we sell for $500 just keeps getting richers - directory, certificates, app server, etc etc. I explain that for most projects the licensed OS is only a few percent of what people spend and getting the right platform can save much more than a few percent on the development, management, richness of the app, hardware flexibility, communications cost etc.. I say that is places where customers are very price sensitive like Education we have had special prices that are 15% of normal and we will keep those prices low enough to get very broad usage in education.

What about platform innovation - doesn’t Linux have more people doing cool stuff?. I gave the analogy of someone saying that the new 747 competitor is being designed by an OpenSource Airplane design group. The interdependencies and need for parallel coordinated innovation requires a commercial model with risk taking. A new 747 can’t be done by a non commercial model. I say that an opensource model could take an old design and have people do cloning and modest improvements on various aspects independently. I give tablet as an example of something that required changes in many aspects on the system -getting Office to do its work and handwriting recognition and new platform capabilities. I say that Linux is not where advances like great games, or tablet or management have come or will come despite the openness. I explain the things like community involvement we have learned from Linux. I go back to the argument above that we are forced in to do big advances or else or installed base will have "share" but there will be no revenue for us. I talk about Stallman’s view that there shouldn’t be jobs doing commercial software and how that would cut off a whole range of innovations that have come from the commercial world.

What about Longhorn? I mostly focus on how the universal store will make it easy to manage and find information across many machines and device types - being both richer and simpler. I ask people about their problems managing files or finding them in our ugly names space. I also about all the search commands - mail, music, photos, fonts, printers that are so hard to remember. I admit we don’t have a baked plan for the work and that even inside Microsoft it is viewed as very ambitious partly because earlier efforts like Cairo proved premature.

What is SPOT? I admit the announcement was a bit of a teaser and that we will stop teasing them at CES. We talked a lot about personalization and how important that is.

4/14/2003

Plaintiff's Exhibit 7191 Comes V. Microsoft

MS-CC-Sun 000000095115 CONFIDENTIAL

What about Xbox Live? I admilted I hadn’t gotten to use it except in controlled demos yet but showed my excitement for it and encouraged them all to try it.

What about Microsoft in india? Lots of discussion about my trip there and how Indian companies like Infosys and Wipro are growing and proving to be effective.

There were many other topics where I got to show some passion and depth about making software better and enabling new things.

I agree with Mich that their model of how we think and what we care about gets very warped if they don’t see us in person. They think everything is a power play and we are using our smarts to outsmart competition more than using it to do cool things for users. The room could have been slightly better, I think through events like this we can get a lot more balance in our image. I think we can get them to include our excitement about new product things and some admiration that we are doing things no one else is doing. The old chestnut about us not innovating will die. There will still be the edge of "Wow they are big and smart and no one is gaining on them except perhaps the Linux model". Ironically as we get our act together in phones/PDAs and TV and MSN/Office subscription this will get even more pronounced.

4/14/2003

Plaintiff's Exhibit 7191 Comes V. Microsoft

MS-CC-Sun 000000095116 CONFIDENTIAL



Credit: wallclimber

Comments

Recent Techrights' Posts

US Government: 6.1% of Site Visitors Use GNU/Linux
GNU/Linux has a considerable share and it is growing
Why the FSF No Longer Recommends Debian, as Explained by Richard Stallman This Month
some weeks ago
 
Richard Stallman Back at the "Rudolf-Diesel" Hörsal "MW 2001" in About 40 Hours
He spoke there before; there's a very high seating capacity there
Symptoms of Upcoming Microsoft Layoffs in XBox
A crashing franchise
Psychiatrist confession: Germanwings crash & Debian toxic culture recognized before suicides
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Gemini Links 19/10/2025: Scentjacking 101, Slop Hype Boosters, and Steam Next Fest
Links for the day
Slopwatch: The Serial Slopper, LinuxSecurity, and Google News
Let's hope slopfarms die as soon as possible
Links 19/10/2025: Cambodia Scam Centres, Slop Hurting Wikipedia Traffic
Links for the day
As Economies Crumble Free as in Beer Will Matter, Not Just Free as in Freedom/Libre (Libertad)
French regions choosing to embrace Software Freedom
25 Years Ago, an Explanation of How Reducing Free Software to 'Apps' Would Interfere With Freedom Goals
there's nothing unreasonable about it
A List of 63 Known Gemini Clients (Software to Browse Geminispace Content With Gemini Protocol)
Not counting browser plugins for Web browsers
Gemini Links 19/10/2025: "Firma Odin Is Transforming" and Bot Attacks While "AFK"
Links for the day
LLM Slop Could Not Rise to Prominence Without Media Complicity and Artificial Hype
Inane garbage disguised as "journalism"
All the Latest Half Dozen Articles by Mehedi Hasan (UbuntuPIT) Only Admit at the End That He's Using LLM Slop
Disclosure is OK, but the practice of using slop is not
The 'Modern' Web of Fake Security and Easy Censorship of Whole Domains
Each year it gets worse
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, October 18, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, October 18, 2025
The Term "AI" is Not New and What Today's Media Calls "AI" Isn't Even AI
Only the hype was new... and totally artificial
Gemini Links 18/10/2025: "Planetary Rings", Steam, and PSU Replacement
Links for the day
Defeating LLM Abuse (State-of-the-Art Plagiarism) in the Area of Linux and GNU, Free Software, BSD, Security and So On
The aim is to get them to stop using LLMs to rip off other people's work
Links 18/10/2025: Russell Vought in Charge, US Government Leans to Russia Again
Links for the day
Credit Where It's Due: LinuxConfig.org Quit Doing LLM Slop, Back to Original and Real Articles
We waited for a while to say this, now it seems conclusive
Of Note: UbuntuPIT Aware of Critics of Slop, Adds Disclosure of Use of LLMs
We appreciate the honesty
Links 18/10/2025: Madagascar's President Flees and ICE Arrests Protest Comedian Robby Roadsteamer
Links for the day
Richard Stallman Near the European Patent Office (EPO) in 3 Days From Now
It'll be a good opportunity for patent examiners to listen, ask questions, and maybe greet him in person
From Scholar to Booster of Slop (and Even Slop in His Own Blog)
We're going to keep an eye on future posts of his
End of Vista 10 Also Good News for the BSDs
There are many news sites that recommend trying GNU/Linux this month
What's Wrong With Liking Parrots or Birds as Pets?
They'd demonise people for speaking about freedom, no matter what they say or do
Digital Sanitation Good Practices
leave behind Microsoftism
10 Days Ago Richard Stallman Gave a Long Interview in French (linuxfr.org)
English translation
Science, Not Fast Food/Junk Food
The commercial exploitation of users won't stop until users exercise full control over their software or - more broadly - their computing (including data)
The Free Software Foundation, Which Has Appointed a 43-Year-Old President, is Looking to Add Another Board Member (or Treasurer)
expect the FSF to add more people
Richard Stallman Confirms Next Week's Talk at Technical University of Munich, We Urge EPO Staff to Attend
That's probably late enough for EPO staff to attend after work
Gemini Links 18/10/2025: Notifications and Geminaut
Links for the day
Many Red Hat People Are Leaving, But It'll Be Framed Publicly as Leaving IBM
Similarly, IBM layoffs (or "RAs" as they're called) include Red Hat layoffs
Expect More Waves of Microsoft Layoffs This Month (at Least Two Rounds Confirmed Already)
From what we can gather, assuming the recent rumours about XBox are true, there will be at least 3 waves of Microsoft layoffs this month alone
Security Issues in Cisco and Jenkins Passed Off as "Linux" Problems
Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt (FUD) tactics
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, October 17, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, October 17, 2025
[Video] Dr. Richard Stallman at Technické Univerzitě v Liberci
New/via libre-liberec.cz
Slopwatch: LinuxSecurity, Linux Journal (Slashdot Media), UbuntuPIT, and Google News (Noise)
egregious plagiarism
Links 17/10/2025: Better Answers Sought After Air Crashes, "China Fans Patriotic Sentiment as Trade War With U.S. Heats Up"
Links for the day
Security is Desirable, But Not When the Term Security is Misused to Imply Centralisation of "Trust" (Whose?)
'Security' is not an excuse for vendor lock-in
Links 17/10/2025: Fentanylware (CheeTok) Causing Problems, Japanese Government Blasts Slop
Links for the day
The Linux Foundation Seems to Have Turned Linux.com Not Only Into a Spamfarm But Also LLM Slopfarm
it's polluting the Web, even important domains like Linux.com, with spam and LLM slop
Links 17/10/2025: UK’s Largest Breach Penalty and Windows TCO Examples
Links for the day
Go Watch Video About Librephone, Get Microsoft Ads
Very ethical company...
Campaign of Defamation Against the People Who Built NixOS (and Are Now Pushed Out From Their Own Project)
We've already grown familiar with - and resistant to - such tactics
Links 17/10/2025: Nestlé Crisis, Canada Post Versus 'Gig Economy' [sic] and Vista 11 Breaks Itself
Links for the day
Tux Machines Has Helped Separate Opinions/Analysis From News
In September 2023 we decided to split things apart and not repeat links in both sites
Tux Machines Has Improved Navigation of GNU/Linux and BSD News
Some more 'wiring' work
What a World Would Look Like If Everyone Used Free Software Only
Freedom is what matters, not "Open".
The Media Helps Microsoft, Amazon and Others (GAFAM and Beyond) Lie About Mass Layoffs Amid Valuation Bubble
The media, instead of saying that there's an "AI bubble" crashing the economy might instead choose the narrative of "jobs replaced by AI"
Bad Tempered? You Might Have Just Given Away That You're Losing the Argument
Brett Wilson LLP is fully aware that it is being investigated
Richard Stallman (RMS) is a Target of Defamation Campaigns Because of His Views on Software (But Politics Are the Excuse for Defaming Him)
Here in this site we try to refrain from politics, except in Daily Links
End of Vista 10 and Rise of GNU/Linux as Client Side Operating System
It seems certain GNU/Linux will grow in popularity over time
Taking Stock of a Week's Worth of EPO Leaks
We remain committed to exposing EPO corruption as long as it keeps happening
Mathieu Parreaux claims FINMA knew since day one
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Calumny, Libel, Joerg Jaspert & debian-private untouchable cyberbullies
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, October 16, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, October 16, 2025
Techrights Turns 19 in 3 Weeks
coverage of suppressed topics and protecting all sources/whistleblowers
International E-Waste Day Same Day as End of Vista 10
message from Akira Urushibata
The EPO's Central Staff Committee Presents Evidence That Staff Compensation Lowered While the Office Increases Income by Illegally Granting Invalid Patents
These people become millionaires by doing illegal things
Second or Third Wave of Microsoft Mass Layoffs in October 2025, This Time Portugal
Those are just the ones we know about, there may be several more
'Help Net Security' (helpnetsecurity.com) May Have Become a Slopfarm as Well
Zeljka Zorz, Editor-in-Chief at Help Net Security, was reported to us
Gemini Links 17/10/2025: Rant About Network Solutions, Strange Anomaly on Lagrange
Links for the day