Bill Gates demands open source

Bill Gates is demanding that AIDS researchers share or open source their results if they're to get some of the $287 million the Gates Foundation is putting into the search for AIDS vaccines.

The Foundation has recognized that one of the forces slowing medical progress is greed -- commercial rivalries, bureaucratic rivalries, personal rivalries.

The gift, which is the largest Foundation gift yet in the fight against AIDS, is aimed at turning that around.

"We have to change the way we work," is the way Nick Hellman, the interim director of HIV projects at the Foundation, put it.

If you can change the way things work in AIDS vaccines, how about the world's other pressing challenges? And if Bill Gates can learn the value of sharing, isn't that the final proof open source works?

I think it is.