Bill Gates has been trying to neutralize the shock waves he sent through the open source community when in a press interview he made an analogy between "communists" and people who advocate a less restrictive IP environment, such Creative Commons licenses and things like that.

"No, no, no. I didn't say those people were 'communists.'" Gates told the "gadgets Weblog," Gizmodo.

Here was his explanation:

"I did say that they're... The question is: what incentive systems should exist in the world? Call 'communism' a system where [in] the extreme case you believe that the idea of the individual getting lots of wealth in return for the things they do... that that's wrong. If you have no incentive for individual excellence and it's just sort of, you know, banned. All the way up to an extreme that nobody would believe in, that there's no redistribution of wealth and that's there's no expiration of rights and control. So you have this huge spectrum.

All I was saying is that the number of people who are at this extreme who believe there should be no incentive systems for creative work - there's actually less of those people. The question seemed to be saying that the whole support for IP and incentive systems was completely falling apart and didn't I notice that was a big trend, and I said, no, on the contrary. The idea of capitalistic incentive: there's actually a higher percentage of the planet - take all of China - that's involved in capitalistic incentive systems than there have been in the past. That's all.

He continued:

"I was just saying that the balance was, 'Hey, let's draw out the creativity of all the smart people in China,' which the communistic system did not. Let's draw out the creativity of the people in India. Let's have these great university systems and the Internet letting you find buyers and sellers in much better ways than ever before. And the world is richer for what's gone on."

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