Informant38

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates had been handing out so many freebies to India's federal and state governments in the last three days that talk of open-source software had started annoying government officials.

Stallman, who founded the Boston-based Free Software Foundation in 1985 to promote the development of freely distributed software, urged Indians to spurn free gifts from Microsoft and adopt free, open-source software.

He and others accuse proprietary software companies of getting poor governments and companies addicted to their expensive software.

"You should not make accusations against a company because it is successful," countered Vivek Kulkarni, information secretary of Karnataka state, after Gates arrived in Bangalore and announced Wednesday that the state capital would be given free Web-building software to provide online information and services to city residents.

"We are a poor country. We cannot develop operating systems and platforms on our own," Kulkarni said.

Kulkarni said he could not find enough software programs or programmers for Linux, the standard-bearer of the free, open-source operating systems.