Krishwords

Wired has an article in which they report about Bill Gates’ comments on Opensource.

One thing Gates won’t be leaving behind in retirement is his distaste for open source software. After one scientist asked if Gates would consider open source uses in health research, the man who built his $280 billion company on the power of intellectual property bristled.

"There’s free software and then there’s open source," he suggested, noting that Microsoft gives away its software in developing countries. With open source software, on the other hand, "there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with."

Open source, he said, creates a license "so that nobody can ever improve the software," he claimed, bemoaning the squandered opportunity for jobs and business. (Yes, Linux fans, we’re aware of how distorted this definition is.) He went back to the analogy of pharmaceuticals: "I think if you invent drugs, you should be able to charge for them," he said, adding with a shrug: "That may seem radical."

The funny part about the whole episode, aside from his ignorance on the matter, is that he is saying to scientists that their approach in academia, which was responsible for propelling the world to the current advanced state, is nonsense. It is time for him to realize that opensource itself was inspired by the scientists in academia. Bill Gates joins Jaron Lanier in his ignorance about science.

Chronicle.com reports

Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences adopted a policy this evening that requires faculty members to allow the university to make their scholarly articles available free online.

New York Times reports

Faculty members are scheduled to vote on a measure that would permit Harvard to distribute their scholarship online, instead of signing exclusive agreements with scholarly journals that often have tiny readerships and high subscription costs.

I am an advocate of anything open (open source, open media, open standards, open access, etc). I was happy when the scientific journal Nature announced that it will use an open peer review model. But Wall Street Journal reports that Nature has given up on this approach. The reason? Lack of participation. it is sad that scientific community is not supportive of such an “open effort”.

But Nature, which is published by a unit of Macmillan Publishers Ltd., said in an editorial in Thursday’s issue that it was ending the experiment due to lack of participation. The journal found that in the competitive world of scientific publishing, the vast majority of authors were unwilling to post their papers and few scientists were willing to criticize their peers’ work publicly by posting comments on Nature’s Web site.

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