Bill Gates is catching on to us. Speaking at the World Economic Forum, Mr Gates made a call for “creative capitalism” — new forms of business that connect with the developing world and innovate around collaborations with the mass majority of the globe.

As it turns out, Bill Gates didn’t really have anything meaningful to say after that. His ideas for new ways of doing business didn’t include the innovations we use at northxsouth, including distributed development or network-based human resources. Surprisingly, Mr Gates wasn’t embarrassed at all about suggesting his “innovation”: a portion of the proceeds of some products will go to a charity that helps a developing country. Wow.

The reality is that Mr Gates’ observation is astute: a real and unexpected side effect of globalization is that there are billions of people living in the developing world and their markets aren’t “opening” up as easily as the existing multinationals of the world would like. Instead, these markets are pushing back with their own needs, born out of an imbalance in global wealth. In the software world, this push-back is manifested by either out-right piracy or adoption of open source platforms.

There will be innovations in doing business that mesh with these emerging markets. But they won’t look like Mr Gates’ tired re-hash of a “save the child” advertising scheme that was played out decades ago. They will look more like northxsouth and other businesses like us. A post by Paula Rooney on zdnet gets this exactly right:

Question for Bill: Does he mean companies like Canonical, whose popular Ubuntu Linux distribution got its start in Africa and is now spreading like wildfire? Is he referring to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) foundation, spearheaded by MIT’s Negroponte, whose $100 laptop runs XO, a free and open source operating system? Is Gates a secret admirer of open source? After all, he is the world’s richest man whose company found guilty of monopolistic practices, very restrictive in its licensing practices and not known for its benevolence.

A company like Microsoft cannot bring about the innovations that Gates calls for because the necessary innovations subvert the basis of their corporate structure. And the reality for dinosaurs like Microsoft is that they are a tiny minority surrounded by an ocean of people that, to date, have been excluded from their privileged club.

Traditional, Cold War-style communism is dead in Russia and the former Soviet Union but Marxist-Leninist communist parties still hold power around the world. In India, for example, the Communist Party of India-Marxist leads state governments in Kerala, West Bengal and Tripura. Those three states have a combined population of around 114 million people who have repeatedly elected in a majority communist government in their states.

Why this is remotely meaningful for the topic of this website is that the CPIM endorses free software in their newly-published “Draft Political Resolution For 19th Party Congress”. The document is ferociously anti-American and goes into great detail about imperialism, climate change, centralization of wealth and a bunch of other topics. And, it talks about free software, copyrights and patents:

Open access to scientific and technological knowledge is critically important to developing nations. The information technology sector and the free software movement have shown that new technologies and methodologies can be developed by cooperative communities without monopoly ownership – either through copyrights or patents. There is a need to develop similar ways of promoting “science/knowledge commons”, across many different scientific and technological disciplines, like biotechnology and drug discovery.

Regardless of the CPIM’s communist ties, the policy position expressed here is increasingly shared amongst “globally dissident” political parties and organizations all over the developing world. And they aren’t all communists … populist and nationalist and social democratic parties in developing countries are promoting information freedom in the software engineering world and beyond. Will the concepts that drive the free software movement fully make the leap into other science and engineering disciplines? And will it be the massive majority of the world — the billions of people who live in developing countries — who push us all in that direction, moved into action out of life-and-death necessity?

While this free software connection to an anti-American, Marxist group will be used by free software’s naysayers as evidence of something horrible about us, what is expressed here is an example of the growing global battle over freedom of information. Developing countries are an enormous demonstration of the reality of the practical and ethical imperative of free software and its counterparts in other realms of human knowledge.