I think it's been a fantastic thing that a very large part, dramatically larger than before, of the world's population gets to participate in capitalistic opportunity; that is, as their societies are better off, more people go to college, they get to do more of the interesting work and contribute to the world economy.

And it's a little scary to me to see people thinking of this as a zero-sum game. It's not like war where you have one winner and one loser. Is it bad for the United States that China would be rich? Take as an extreme that India and China were as rich as the United States is. Now, on a relative basis in terms of political power and percentage of economic wealth, on a relative basis the U.S. would be worse off, but in any other value frame we'd be way better off just in terms of the living conditions in those countries, their ability to come up with better products, to come up with better services; that's a good thing.

And so we're starting to see we're at the start of a process where the whole world is getting into this virtuous cycle of the higher income, better living standards, all of those things. [Emphasis added.]

And so it's a little scary to me to see some people in the U.S. saying, no, we need to put up walls and make sure that, Oh, they're getting good jobs; no, no, no, there's a finite number of those, let's hold that back.

Clearly Berkeley UNIX, the BSD distribution was a fantastic thing. It let a lot of computer science students understand operating systems, tinker around. It was an element that allowed Sun to get going and build its products, that had been a huge contribution.

So a lot of software will have the source code available. There will be these different licensing models and I think this is one thing where researchers, universities, people have to think carefully. We tend to favor the distribution license that was used for BSD, which is a very non-coercive open license that allows you to modify it and make your modifications available, or you can actually modify it and create a version that you build a company around, hire people, pay taxes and there's this virtuous cycle that there's lots of free software that often comes out of the universities, sometimes that just generates more free software, sometimes it generates companies and jobs that then pay taxes and that money goes back to the university to keep this ecosystem going, and that ecosystem that the U.S. has is the envy of the world. [Emphasis added.]

The GPL in our view should be used, which is the license that says you can't enhance it and create a commercial product. Our view is that it should be used very narrowly, and we think people should think twice. So if you have government funded research, it's ironic that then if it goes into that GPL you can't create a company that creates jobs that pays taxes. And so most of the countries outside the U.S. have stayed away from that because they want to get the ecosystem that we have.

So over time in software we'll have free software and commercial software and the equilibrium between them will always shift as people see the support, the indemnification, the certain types of innovation. There is some innovation in terms of taking risk, like building the system that will do machine translation. That will be done because of the scale of the problem and the nature, it will be done, it will come from research but it will be done in the commercial world and then eventually there may be free versions of that.

So it really is an interplay that's working very well. It keeps us on our toes and except for a little bit of overuse of the restrictive license sometimes, I think the direction it's going in is quote [sic] good.

I think it's been a fantastic thing that a very large part, dramatically larger than before, of the world's population gets to participate in capitalistic opportunity; that is, as their societies are better off, more people go to college, they get to do more of the interesting work and contribute to the world economy.

And it's a little scary to me to see people thinking of this as a zero-sum game. It's not like war where you have one winner and one loser. Is it bad for the United States that China would be rich? Take as an extreme that India and China were as rich as the United States is. Now, on a relative basis in terms of political power and percentage of economic wealth, on a relative basis the U.S. would be worse off, but in any other value frame we'd be way better off just in terms of the living conditions in those countries, their ability to come up with better products, to come up with better services; that's a good thing.

And so we're starting to see we're at the start of a process where the whole world is getting into this virtuous cycle of the higher income, better living standards, all of those things. [Emphasis added.]

And so it's a little scary to me to see some people in the U.S. saying, no, we need to put up walls and make sure that, Oh, they're getting good jobs; no, no, no, there's a finite number of those, let's hold that back.

Clearly Berkeley UNIX, the BSD distribution was a fantastic thing. It let a lot of computer science students understand operating systems, tinker around. It was an element that allowed Sun to get going and build its products, that had been a huge contribution.

So a lot of software will have the source code available. There will be these different licensing models and I think this is one thing where researchers, universities, people have to think carefully. We tend to favor the distribution license that was used for BSD, which is a very non-coercive open license that allows you to modify it and make your modifications available, or you can actually modify it and create a version that you build a company around, hire people, pay taxes and there's this virtuous cycle that there's lots of free software that often comes out of the universities, sometimes that just generates more free software, sometimes it generates companies and jobs that then pay taxes and that money goes back to the university to keep this ecosystem going, and that ecosystem that the U.S. has is the envy of the world. [Emphasis added.]

The GPL in our view should be used, which is the license that says you can't enhance it and create a commercial product. Our view is that it should be used very narrowly, and we think people should think twice. So if you have government funded research, it's ironic that then if it goes into that GPL you can't create a company that creates jobs that pays taxes. And so most of the countries outside the U.S. have stayed away from that because they want to get the ecosystem that we have.

So over time in software we'll have free software and commercial software and the equilibrium between them will always shift as people see the support, the indemnification, the certain types of innovation. There is some innovation in terms of taking risk, like building the system that will do machine translation. That will be done because of the scale of the problem and the nature, it will be done, it will come from research but it will be done in the commercial world and then eventually there may be free versions of that.

So it really is an interplay that's working very well. It keeps us on our toes and except for a little bit of overuse of the restrictive license sometimes, I think the direction it's going in is quote [sic] good.