People's Democracy

Beware Of Bill Gates Charity: Stallman

RICHARD Stallman, the pioneer of free software movement, has warned Indians to beware of Microsoft chairman Bill Gates gestures of charity. "Let not his doling out a fraction of his wealth mask the colossal harm he is inflicting by pushing the Microsoft agenda", said Stallman while participating in a book release function organised by Prajasakti Publishing House in New Delhi on November 11.  

The book - No Sir, No Monopoly! Free Software – A Perspective was released by B K Keayla, convenor, National Working Group on Patent Laws. It was authored by Richard Stallman himself and published by Prajasakti Publishing House. While the meeting was chaired by Dinesh Abrol of Delhi Science Forum, those present on the dias included Kiran Chandra, technical in-charge of  Prajasakti and Vishnu of Jalaja Technologies who sponsored this book. K Veeraiah, Delhi Bureau chief of Prajasakti welcomed the gathering. 

It was a rare coincidence that the two opposing giants - Bill Gates and Richard Stallman were in the same city, at the same time, advocating two contrasting visions. With India set to become one of the biggest software markets in the world in another decade, Bill Gates sought to expand his monopoly in software under the guise of charity. Stallman was in Delhi to warn about the dangerous consequences of entrenchment of non-free software in all spheres. Apart from meeting a few MPs to stress that India should not allow patents on software, the book release function was the only occasion where he publicly espoused the cause of the free software movement.  

Stallman said that vigorous efforts are on to colonise the world of computer users by a few big monopoly computer companies and called for resisting this phenomenon by spreading the network of free software movement. He called upon countries like India to emphatically reject the Wipo Copyright Treaty which is intended to further strengthen the grip of  big business on the markets. "The World Intellectual Property Organisation does not represent public interest and the people must likened software programmes to recipes and said preventing sharing of software was like asking neighbours not to share their recipes. "It is morally wrong to make people promise that they will never share. As it is we don't always share everything with everybody, so why create barriers?", asked Stallman. He cautioned particularly against allowing Microsoft to peddle its software in thousands of Indian schools. "Bill Gates donations of computers to Indian schools is really aimed at getting children hooked on to licensed software. It is a bit like selling cigarettes to children." He called for encouraging the usage of free software among Indian students.

Stallman also warned against the impending danger of software patents and called for a worldwide resistance movement against these monopolistic trends of big companies.

(Richard Stallman is the founder of the gnu project, launched in 1984 to develop the free operating system GNU. Principal author of the GNU compiler collection designed to support diverse architectures and multiple languages which now supports over 30 different architectures and 7 programming languages. Stallman also wrote the GNU Symbolic Debugger (GDB), GNU emacs, and various other GNU programmes. He also received the Grace Hopper Award for 1991.)

(INN)