LEAVE IT to Bill Gates. There is a reason he is the richest man in the world.

On a visit to China last April, he announced a program that would sell a $3 package of Windows XP and MS Office to the governments of poor countries that subsidize computer purchases by students.

“All human beings deserve the opportunity to reach their full potential,” Gates said in announcing Microsoft’s latest program to bridge the digital divide.

It was a public relations coup, and a shrewd business move at that.

Now $3 is a great price for MS Office 2007, even though it’s the home and student edition that doesn’t have PowerPoint. But Windows XP Starter Edition is a crippled version of a five-year-old operating system, with networking disabled and multitasking severely limited.

So the software isn’t great, but it’s good enough to get the job done.

Unfortunately, “work” isn’t just personal productivity, it’s technology lockdown. It’s about creating a new generation of computer users hooked on Windows and programs running under the proprietary operating system.

Microsoft isn’t shy about this goal of “reaching the next billion” of computer users and linking them to its technology.

“We think many of these people will become consumers in the future,” said Orlando Ayala, senior vice president of Microsoft’s emerging market development group.

A closer look at the $3 deal also exposes the price of the software as an artificial and arbitrary matter. Why sell software priced in the hundreds of dollars for just $3? Why not $2? Gold $5?

Even the Starter Edition is an arbitrary marketing-oriented creation that artificially limits the functionality of the software. It goes back to the day when some marketing geniuses at Intel decided to sell a version of the 486 processor with the math coprocessor disabled, simply so they could sell the same chip at a lower price, without having customers willing to do so. pay more for it complain. Shutting down a piece of software so you can sell it cheaply makes a lot of sense.

Significantly, Microsoft’s $3 offer comes at a time when the open source Linux operating system is becoming increasingly popular as a free alternative to Windows on desktops and laptops. By targeting its program at developing countries, Microsoft seems intent on avoiding Linux in markets where the free alternative is more likely to prosper at the expense of Windows.

But in the same week that Gates announced the $3 subsidy, a major software milestone passed without fanfare.

There was no countdown in Times Square. There is no cool demo of an aging tech guru. No big ad campaigns or clever TV commercials. With a refreshing lack of advertising, the latest version of Ubuntu, one of the most popular Linux distributions, was released to the general public on April 19.

On that day, the Ubuntu home page was replaced with an empty page with a title that read “Ubuntu 7.04 – Well Done”.

There were only two sentences below the title: “Thank you to everyone who helped make Ubuntu 7.04 a reality. Thousands of you helped code, test, translate and promote Ubuntu and everyone can celebrate today’s release.”

Beneath the note were links to servers in some 30 countries where the 700MB file (an ISO disk image) could be downloaded.

The lack of advertising wasn’t the only thing that set Ubuntu apart.

Bucking industry trends, the Ubuntu developers delivered the latest version of the operating system on time, as promised. In stark contrast, Microsoft missed numerous release targets on its five-year path to Windows Vista, and even Apple had to delay the June release of Leopard, the new version of the Mac OS X operating system.

The on-time delivery of Ubuntu 7.04 is another sign that the open source approach to software development is working. Unlike the traditional approach where one company hires all the programmers and controls product development, open source projects are outsourced to volunteer programmers from around the world who work cooperatively over the Internet.

And Ubuntu 7.04, codenamed Feisty Fawn, is not disabled software. It is a sophisticated, fully functional and modern operating system that is more secure and possibly more efficient than Windows Vista. It also comes with a lot of great software, including an office suite that does what MS Office does, all for free.

So why would a developing country want to pay $3 per PC when they can get a much better deal for free? The actual cost of Microsoft’s $3 offer for developing countries is much higher than its price suggests. The real cost is being sucked into a proprietary world and the loss of options that open source software would bring.