Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft Corp., told the House Science Committee Wednesday that America's "position as the global leader in innovation is at risk."

Now that Firefox 3 is out and so many of us dislike some of the new default behaviors I thought of a way that a number of us could be made very happy, but it requires the services of programmers within the open source community.

Bill Gates steps down as the Chairman of Microsoft on July 1st to transition to full time philanthropic efforts with the Gates Foundation. However, I wonder how effective Bill will be other than writing checks. You see Bill's never played well with others.

Microsoft is beset with competition from all sides, unlike any it has seen in decades, and Bill Gates, who co-founded the company 32 years ago, still intends to step away next year as planned. But so far, Mr. Gates, Microsoft’s 51-year-old chairman, shows no sign of fading away.

What used to be created by a team of open source programmers is now being done by one or two programmers. I have seen this trend happening with a few different projects recently and found myself wondering if this is what is needed to get more, viable applications in the market - faster.

If you are Bill Gates or Linus Torvalds, it is totally understandable to have an ego the size of the biggest planet. The two has been known to make comments that will forever keep the geek pride alive. If you want proof, just read the following quotes from Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds, and be the judge of who has a bigger ego between them.

Bill Gates' new company is accumulating patents and operating as a shell

I think if Bill Gates met a Debian system and installed a program from the repositories, he might just go to his engineers and say, "Why can't it be like this?"

"Hear what Microsoft's chairman Bill Gates had to say during his last official visit to the UK before he 'retires' later this year. IT PRO attended the special event hosted by the Institute of Directors (IoD) and, after Gates had done his thing there was a Q&A session with the billionaire and industry figurehead." And also note how some of his answers match up rather nicely with F/OSS.