Talking Linux IP with Bill Gates
If you could ask Bill Gates one question, what would you ask? I spent an hour today with Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates on the company's Redmond campus. I chose to ask Bill about Microsoft's intellectual property stance against Linux and its open source developers …
Context & Ripple Effects
This interview sits inside a deliberate Microsoft outreach moment: Kennedy was one of several independent bloggers given an hour with Bill Gates on the Redmond campus the same day, with TechCrunch asking about DRM, GigaOM about web apps, and Micro Persuasion filing its own session — a coordinated blogger roundtable rather than a traditional press briefing, complete with Zune devices handed to attendees.
The Linux question Kennedy chose has history at Microsoft: Gates had already faced down questions about the company's posture toward open source in a November 2005 interview with Computing, so this exchange reads as the sequel — testing whether the co-founder's IP stance toward Linux and its developers had shifted a year on.
First-order effects
- Gates puts Microsoft's intellectual-property position against Linux and open-source developers on record once more, this time before an independent-blogger audience whose questions and answers publish unedited and simultaneously.
- Four-plus bloggers posting Gates interviews on the same day converts a single campus visit into immediate, multi-angle coverage — DRM, web apps, and Linux IP — without a press-release intermediary.
Second-order effects
- Rivals courting developer communities now face a bar set by Microsoft's willingness to put its co-founder directly in front of bloggers, making unfiltered executive access a competitive expectation rather than a novelty.
- Open-source projects and their corporate backers read statements like this one for signals of patent-enforcement intent, which shapes licensing choices and how comfortably enterprises mix Microsoft and Linux stacks.
Third-order effects
- If platform owners keep asserting IP as a competitive lever while simultaneously courting the developer blogosphere, patent portfolios and licensing terms become a visible part of platform selection — pushing the dispute toward standards bodies and, eventually, regulators.
The trend: Platform vendors are taking their intellectual-property arguments straight to independent developer audiences, with bloggers replacing trade press as the venue where executive stances get tested.