A shut Gates on open source

Sure Bill. We believe you.

http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,7638578%5E15331%5E%5Enbv%5E15306-15318,00.html

A shut Gates on open source

James Riley

OCTOBER 23, 2003

MICROSOFT founder and chairman Bill Gates has slammed moves
by political parties in Australia and elsewhere to legislate
the adoption of open source software.

In an interview with The Australian at the Microsoft Office
System launch in New York, Mr Gates said any such moves by
government were wrongheaded and would result in a reduction
in public sector productivity.

Mr Gates claimed the open source system was "inferior" and
said it represented a false economy in relation to lost
opportunities to improve productivity.

"Our position is that organisations should simply buy the
best software for their situation," he said.

"Forcing people to use software that is inefficient? Do you
want your Government to be efficient?

"Governments are very information-driven. They are not
factories. It's all just information," he said.

In the past 10 months, politicians at various levels in
Australia, Brazil, China, South Korea and Japan have
suggested that government procurement procedures should
mandate at least the consideration of open source
alternatives to reduce overall IT costs.

China, South Korea and Japan have outlined tentative plans
to design their own open source operating system to compete
with Microsoft Windows and applications to compete with
Microsoft Office as a means of reducing IT pressures on the
public purse.

"I think it's just commonsense that people won't choose to
use inferior software. People want their tax dollars to go
as far as possible, and in most cases they will see more
value in the offerings that we provide," Mr Gates said.

The Australian Government, particularly the Australian
Taxation Office, Centrelink and various health agencies had
invested heavily in XML-based technologies and processes.

Mr Gates said the argument that its software was too
expensive was simply wrong. And despite complaints from some
Third World governments about Microsoft's global pricing -
where the company's software essentially carries the same
list price wherever it is sold -- he maintains the company
has been the primary driver in pushing down the cost of IT
systems.

"Our business model is entirely oriented toward high volume,
low price," Mr Gates said. "In any IT project, our software
is going to be just 1 or 2 per cent of (the project cost)."

Meanwhile, Mr Gates has renewed Microsoft's recent pledges
to radically improve its security procedures in conjunction
with the rest of the industry following the unprecedented
levels of virus and worm outbreaks in recent months.

"This is a case where the industry and Microsoft need to do
better, (although) the vast majority of our customers have
not been affected by these problems," Mr Gates said.

"But we take responsibility for the fact that it was too
hard for people to know whether they had their firewalls up
the right way, and that it was too hard for them to keep
their (security patch) software up to date.

"If we can make those (functions) incredibly easy, then
we'll bring down the scale of these incidents and the
frequency very dramatically."

He said that improving security on all Microsoft functions
had been made a primary focus of the company's $US6 billion
($8.6 billion) research and development budget.

To facilitate co-ordination regarding the introduction of OSS SW in Vietnam

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