In muted tones, Microsoft"s chairman warned governments and companies that open source software is not the way to go if they are in the business of creating jobs and intellectual property. Bill Gates was on the Malaysian leg of a whirlwind Asian tour, which included a speech on his vision of "seamless computing", when he voiced his concerns over the growing goodwill towards open source, especially in Asia.
It is one of the top two challenges facing Microsoft today, the other being software piracy, which is making governments lose tax revenue, Gates outlined on Jun 29 at a roundtable for key Southeast Asian press. His packed Malaysian itinerary included a speech to over 3,000 IT professionals on seamless computing, and an MOU-signing for a Partners in Learning initiative for Malaysia. At the roundtable, Gates, also Microsoft"s chief software architect, emphasised how damaging open source software can be.
"If you don"t want to create jobs or intellectual property, then there is a tendency to develop open source. It is not something you do as a day job. If you want to give it away, you work on it at night," he said. "[Open source] doesn"t guarantee upward compatibility or do that kind of integration [for seamless computing to work].