LEAVE IT to Bill Gates. There’s a reason he’s 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 governments in poor countries that subsidize student computer purchases.

“All human beings deserve the chance 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, too.

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 disabled networking and severely limited multitasking.

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

Unfortunately, “work” is not just personal productivity, it is technological blockade. It’s about creating a new generation of computer users hooked on Windows and programs that run under the proprietary operating system.

Microsoft is not shy about this goal of “reaching the next billion” of computer users and engaging them with its technology.

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

A closer look at the $3 deal also exposes the price of the software as an artificial and arbitrary affair. Why sell software priced at hundreds of dollars for only $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 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 willing customers. pay more for it they complain. Crippling a piece of software so you can sell it cheap 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 determined to avoid Linux in markets where the free alternative is more likely to thrive 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 publicity, the latest version of Ubuntu, one of the most popular Linux distributions, was released to the general public on April 19.

That day, the Ubuntu home page was replaced by an empty page with a headline reading “Ubuntu 7.04 – Well done”.

There were just 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 you can all celebrate today’s release.”

Below the note were links to servers in about 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 in its five-year run toward 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 works. 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 software disabled. It is a sophisticated, fully functional, 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 you can get a much better deal for free? The real cost of Microsoft’s $3 offering to developing countries is much higher than its price suggests. The real cost is being sucked into a proprietary world and the loss of choice that open source software would bring.