5 ms·

You're comparing apples and oranges, I think. Bill and Melinda Gates have done tremendous good in the world, and anyone who thinks otherwise is either crude or

You're comparing apples and oranges, I think. Bill and Melinda Gates have done tremendous good in the world, and anyone who thinks otherwise is either crude or uninformed; but what does that have to do with software? Or freedom? Their being tremendous philanthropists has little to nothing to do with whether or not the way they earned their money is ethical -- and I hope that, in this day and age, it's clear that it's not only possible but easy to get money in a way that isn't ethical. You can mock RMS's contributions all you want, but the fact is that he has done a good deal for the world. He created the basis and licensing for the operating system that's been on more devices than any other operating system that's ever existed, that's run on more processors than any other operating system that's ever existed. This thing he started is the basis for the bulk of the internet, for the architecture that runs web sites; people don't give it this credit often enough, but Gnu/Linux in many ways has made the modern technological world possible, and without things like GCC and the standard utilities, it would have died a sad death in 1991. Heck, just for his work on Gnu AWK alone, I think Richard Stallman deserves a few geek medals. And finally, his Gnu Public License and its derivatives (the Apache License et al) have been instrumental in filling the world with an open architecture that makes many of the amazing things we're able to do now possible. It is possible to admire Bill Gates for his humanitarian work while believing that much of his Microsoft legacy has been bad for software and for freedom in general. I know Stallman can seem like a cranky old man, but he's more careful and thoughtful than you're giving him credit for. When people ask him whether Microsoft (or any company) is "evil," he usually says that you can't say that a whole company is evil, and you have to think about particular things they've done. I believe that his argument that some of Microsoft's business practices are unethical is sound; and while I think Bill and Melinda Gates are wonderful philanthropists, that doesn't mean that I have to think that they're great for software, too.

avar 16y ago
> Bill and Melinda Gates have done tremendous good in the world, and anyone who thinks otherwise is either crude or uninformed. Their foundation has done a lot of good, but it doesn't exist in a vacuum. Why does it have all that money in the first place? Well, mostly because Microsoft managed to work itself into a monopoly position with dirty tactics, and the proliferation of their own proprietary file formats. This meant that millions of people and organizations had to pay the Microsoft tax, which was later used to start the B&M Gates Foundation. How many millions of US$ would those people have donated to charity if their budgets hadn't been constrained by purchasing Microsoft software? Some of them were probably African countries that could have used that money to buy vaccines 10 years ago. Don't get me wrong, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is doing some good work now, but to only look at their current donations is to only see the tip of the iceberg.
- jonah 16y ago
  The foundation itself isn't completely blameless. They have some of their n billions invested* in the very companies who's environmental and social policies are are causing harm to people they are trying to help with their clinics, etc. *I heard about this several years ago so would be happy to be told they've changed this. Their response was that the fund management and philanthropic arms of the foundation were firewalled and the former's directive was to simply maximize growth. I find this unfortunate at best.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - _politicalist 16y ago
    It appears that the Gates Foundation works under certain contstraints, dictated of course by the elite family which runs it. For example, they appear to strongly respect intellectual property and corporate profits, as you might expect from a Microsoft founder. (This may take the form of ensuring that companies like Monsanto benefit from aid.) There was an informed article in The Nation which touched upon the undemocratic vision the Gates Foundation allegedly has; people affected by poverty do struggle to fix their own problems in a self-governing way. Elite benefactors like Gates or Soros may conceivably help to strengthen the systems which make it hard to self-govern, along with whatever benefits they accomplish. http://www.thenation.com/article/gates-foundation-and-africas-hunger http://www.thenation.com/article/gates-foundation-and-africa... (Incidentally, I don't see why Gates is considered a particularly predatory businessman. He just happened to be the one who succeeded, as usually happens; and other businesspeople don't like an entity with the resulting market power. He might be a much nicer guy than many of his competitors, for all I know.)
- mattmanser 16y ago
  This is an extremely naive diatribe. There are few OSS projects that have done anything more than steal ideas from commercial software in terms of innovation. Programming languages are the only place I can think of that OSS is cutting edge. MS pushed the boundaries of software to the extreme. Go look at any of their competitors at the age of their dominance. Man, look at Netscape navigator in its bloated unusable form when IE6 came out. Compare Excel to Lotus 123. Or Outlook to Lotus Notes. MS didn't win because it was evil. It won because it was very, very, very, very, very good. Google is winning now, with its even more extremely closed source software known as google search, because it is very, very, very good. It's just pretending to support OSS. Without actually giving away the crown jewels. And MS still is very good in a lot of fields, OSes being the primary one. Only Apple is a close competitor and it's a lot more expensive. So get off your soapbox and smell reality. The overall benefit MS software has donated to the world is worth many more trillions of dollars than the licenses cost.

avar 16y ago

> Bill and Melinda Gates have done tremendous good in the world, and anyone who thinks otherwise is either crude or uninformed. Their foundation has done a lot of good, but it doesn't exist in a vacuum. Why does it have all that money in the first place? Well, mostly because Microsoft managed to work itself into a monopoly position with dirty tactics, and the proliferation of their own proprietary file formats. This meant that millions of people and organizations had to pay the Microsoft tax, which was later used to start the B&M Gates Foundation. How many millions of US$ would those people have donated to charity if their budgets hadn't been constrained by purchasing Microsoft software? Some of them were probably African countries that could have used that money to buy vaccines 10 years ago. Don't get me wrong, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is doing some good work now, but to only look at their current donations is to only see the tip of the iceberg.

jonah 16y ago
The foundation itself isn't completely blameless. They have some of their n billions invested* in the very companies who's environmental and social policies are are causing harm to people they are trying to help with their clinics, etc. *I heard about this several years ago so would be happy to be told they've changed this. Their response was that the fund management and philanthropic arms of the foundation were firewalled and the former's directive was to simply maximize growth. I find this unfortunate at best.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- _politicalist 16y ago
  It appears that the Gates Foundation works under certain contstraints, dictated of course by the elite family which runs it. For example, they appear to strongly respect intellectual property and corporate profits, as you might expect from a Microsoft founder. (This may take the form of ensuring that companies like Monsanto benefit from aid.) There was an informed article in The Nation which touched upon the undemocratic vision the Gates Foundation allegedly has; people affected by poverty do struggle to fix their own problems in a self-governing way. Elite benefactors like Gates or Soros may conceivably help to strengthen the systems which make it hard to self-govern, along with whatever benefits they accomplish. http://www.thenation.com/article/gates-foundation-and-africas-hunger http://www.thenation.com/article/gates-foundation-and-africa... (Incidentally, I don't see why Gates is considered a particularly predatory businessman. He just happened to be the one who succeeded, as usually happens; and other businesspeople don't like an entity with the resulting market power. He might be a much nicer guy than many of his competitors, for all I know.)
mattmanser 16y ago
This is an extremely naive diatribe. There are few OSS projects that have done anything more than steal ideas from commercial software in terms of innovation. Programming languages are the only place I can think of that OSS is cutting edge. MS pushed the boundaries of software to the extreme. Go look at any of their competitors at the age of their dominance. Man, look at Netscape navigator in its bloated unusable form when IE6 came out. Compare Excel to Lotus 123. Or Outlook to Lotus Notes. MS didn't win because it was evil. It won because it was very, very, very, very, very good. Google is winning now, with its even more extremely closed source software known as google search, because it is very, very, very good. It's just pretending to support OSS. Without actually giving away the crown jewels. And MS still is very good in a lot of fields, OSes being the primary one. Only Apple is a close competitor and it's a lot more expensive. So get off your soapbox and smell reality. The overall benefit MS software has donated to the world is worth many more trillions of dollars than the licenses cost.