Pirates bigger threat than open source

According to ZDNet, Bill Gates recently said that piracy was a tougher competitor to Microsoft than open source.

Suuure it is Bill, good one.

At the end of the day, pirates create a whole new generation of users who want to use your products. That's how Microsoft got so big in the first place, as they themselves will reluctantly admit.

But with Linux and open source, the users don't need Bill. He can't bill them at all. With something like 80% of the Internet running on open source systems like Linux and BSD, Microsoft's worst nightmare is the same thing happening to the desktop.

"As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect..." -- Bill Gates, 1998