This is a report from the Australian press.

V. Sasi Kumar

A shut Gates on open source James Riley OCTOBER 23, 2003

MICROSOFT founder and chairman Bill Gates has slammed moves by political parties in Australia and elsewhere to legislate the adoption of open source software.

In an interview with The Australian at the Microsoft Office System launch in New York, Mr Gates said any such moves by government were wrongheaded and would result in a reduction in public sector productivity.

Mr Gates claimed the open source system was "inferior" and said it represented a false economy in relation to lost opportunities to improve productivity.

"Our position is that organisations should simply buy the best software for their situation," he said.

"Forcing people to use software that is inefficient? Do you want your Government to be efficient?

"Governments are very information-driven. They are not factories. It's all just information," he said.

In the past 10 months, politicians at various levels in Australia, Brazil, China, South Korea and Japan have suggested that government procurement procedures should mandate at least the consideration of open source alternatives to reduce overall IT costs.

China, South Korea and Japan have outlined tentative plans to design their own open source operating system to compete with Microsoft Windows and applications to compete with Microsoft Office as a means of reducing IT pressures on the public purse.

"I think it's just commonsense that people won't choose to use inferior software. People want their tax dollars to go as far as possible, and in most cases they will see more value in the offerings that we provide," Mr Gates said.

The Australian Government, particularly the Australian Taxation Office, Centrelink and various health agencies had invested heavily in XML-based technologies and processes.

Mr Gates said the argument that its software was too expensive was simply wrong. And despite complaints from some Third World governments about Microsoft's global pricing - where the company's software essentially carries the same list price wherever it is sold -- he maintains the company has been the primary driver in pushing down the cost of IT systems.

"Our business model is entirely oriented toward high volume, low price," Mr Gates said. "In any IT project, our software is going to be just 1 or 2 per cent of (the project cost)."

Meanwhile, Mr Gates has renewed Microsoft's recent pledges to radically improve its security procedures in conjunction with the rest of the industry following the unprecedented levels of virus and worm outbreaks in recent months.

"This is a case where the industry and Microsoft need to do better, (although) the vast majority of our customers have not been affected by these problems," Mr Gates said.

"But we take responsibility for the fact that it was too hard for people to know whether they had their firewalls up the right way, and that it was too hard for them to keep their (security patch) software up to date.

"If we can make those (functions) incredibly easy, then we'll bring down the scale of these incidents and the frequency very dramatically."

He said that improving security on all Microsoft functions had been made a primary focus of the company's $US6 billion ($8.6 billion) research and development budget.