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It’s not that Microsoft became less evil, but the Overton window of what’s acceptable for tech companies has been constantly translating towards evil. In 1977
by pavlov 5y ago
It’s not that Microsoft became less evil, but the Overton window of what’s acceptable for tech companies has been constantly translating towards evil.
In 1977 Bill Gates wrote a public letter saying that software piracy is wrong and developers should get paid; this was highly controversial at the time and launched the hackers-vs-MSFT dichotomy. A lot of people sincerely believed it’s evil to use copyright law to prevent anyone from making copies of software.
40+ years later, evil in the software industry is pretty much “willingly assists in genocide”. All other evil behaviors have been adopted and rehabilitated into a business growth narrative, helped along by Google’s gaslighting slogan “Don’t do evil” which led a generation to believe that anything Google is doing can’t be evil.
- GartzenDeHaes 5y ago| software piracy is wrong and developers should get paid ... while at the same time stealing everything they could find. One of the most obvious examples was Bill Crowther's ADVENTURE, which Microsoft sold for multiple platforms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Adventure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Adventure
- pavlov 5y agoYeah, it's evil to take advantage of a copyright regime that authors like Crowther didn't really consider when releasing their code. But it's more of a contract dispute between two parties. The scope is very narrow compared to some of the hair-raising practices of Google, Meta, Uber, Elon Musk, cryptocurrency exchanges, and other contemporary tech barons who reach billions of people.