Bill Gates Gets Sharing...Almost

Yesterday I wrote about Microsoft's attempt to persuade scientists to adopt its unloved Windows HPC platform by throwing in a few free (as in beer) programs. Here's another poisoned chalice that's being offered:

In between trying to eradicate polio, tame malaria, and fix the broken U.S. education system, Gates has managed to fulfill a dream of taking some classic physics lectures and making them available free over the Web. The lectures, done in 1964 by noted scientist (and Manhattan Project collaborator) Richard Feynman, take notions such as gravity and explains how they work and the broad implications they have in understanding the ways of the universe.

Gates first saw the series of lectures 20 years ago on vacation and dreamed of being able to make them broadly available. After spending years tracking down the rights--and spending some of his personal fortune--Gates has done just that. Tapping his colleagues in Redmond to create interactive software to accompany the videos, Gates is making the collection available free from the Microsoft Research Web site.

What a kind bloke - spending his *own* personal fortune of uncountable billions, just to make this stuff freely available.

But wait: what do we find when go to that "free" site:

Clicking will install Microsoft Silverlight.

So it seems that this particular free has its own non-free (as in freedom) payload: what a surprise.

That's a disappointment - but hardly unexpected; Microsoft's mantra is that you don't get something for nothing. But elsewhere in the interview with Gates, there's some rather interesting stuff:

Education, particularly if you've got motivated students, the idea of specializing in the brilliant lecture and text being done in a very high-quality way, and shared by everyone, and then the sort of lab and discussion piece that's a different thing that you pick people who are very good at that.

Technology brings more to the lecture availability, in terms of sharing best practices and letting somebody have more resources to do amazing lectures. So, you'd hope that some schools would be open minded to this fitting in, and making them more effective.

What's interesting is that his new-found work in the field of education is bringing him constantly face-to-face with the fact that sharing is actually rather a good thing, and that the more the sharing of knowledge can be facilitated, the more good results.

Of course, he's still trapped by the old Microsoft mindset, and constantly thinking how he can exploit that sharing, in this case by freighting it with all kinds of Microsoft gunk. But at least he's started on the journey, albeit unknowingly.

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