In Software, Still Testy After All These Years ... "Feisty and combative, Mr. Gates says he finds I.B.M.'s software unimpressive — a patchwork of programming projects, not as coherent or as integrated as Microsoft's competing offerings. "WebSphere is a marketing term for I.B.M.'s platform," Mr. Gates said.
"We have nothing against free software," Mr. Gates insisted. But, he added, it just so happens that the commercial model works better in most cases for both producers and consumers.
Good software, he conceded, is running on Linux systems, including computerized special-effects for Hollywood movies and gene-sequencing research. "But that is because something has been built on top of it," he said. The Linux technology itself, is "sort of Unix of the 1970's," Mr. Gates said. "There's not one iota that's changed."