Bill Gates Finally Gets It…But Not Really
July 23rd, 2006 by atari
Last week the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation made what was quite a : it is donating $287 million to AIDS research, but only to those who leave their work open for sharing and collaboration. The Wall Street Journal reported that:
Frustrated that over two decades of research have failed to produce an AIDS vaccine, Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates is tying his foundation’s latest, biggest AIDS-vaccine grants to a radical concept: Those who get the money must first agree to share the results of their work in short order.
Low and behold, Bill Gates has finally and wholly publicly acknowledged the benefits of open sharing and collaboration. Mr. (another shocking revelation!) has now finally of open sharing and collaboration. But what, Mr. Gates, what about software? Why does this apply to the development of AIDS vaccines, and not open access to and the collaborative building of technologies, and culture more generally? Doesn’t it so happen that by propretization and the lack of sharing and collaborating, technological and cultural progress is similarly stifled?
Perhaps if he could just bring himself to answer that question, he wouldn’t be the richest man in the world after all.
August 10th, 2006 at 6:38 am
But… by selling proprietary software, he’s amassed a huge fortune which is now the best chance we’ve got at funding successful AIDS research and vaccinating the third world any time soon. Life is full of interesting tradeoffs, isn’t it?
August 11th, 2006 at 3:24 am
yup, of course i’ve considered that, but at the same time, one could wonder what the tradeoff has been/will be for the spread of this proprietary software and especially some of microsoft’s most threatening technologies (vista, drm, etc.) if anything, perhaps now that he kind of gets it he might be able to apply some kind of analogous reasoning to MS’s own strategies (but wait, isn’t he supposedly resigning from all of his MS-related positions w/in two years?)