Richard Stallman on news.com:
Thanks to Mr. Gates, we now know that an open Internet with protocols anyone can implement is communism. (…)
Here’s what Bill Gates told Microsoft employees in 1991:
“If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today…A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose.”
Mr. Gates’ secret is out now–he too was a “communist;” he, too, recognized that software patents were harmful–until Microsoft became one of these giants. Now Microsoft aims to use software patents to impose whatever price it chooses on you and me. And if we object, Mr. Gates will call us “communists.”
Read the entire (not long) article and join the No Software Patents campaign (We just received 2 good news from old Europe).