Bill Gates is an aggressive man. When turned to business, this aggression leads to the creation and abuse of monopoly powers, especially if there's an IBM to ab

Bill Gates is an aggressive man. When turned to business, this aggression leads to the creation and abuse of monopoly powers, especially if there's an IBM to abuse in the early days. When turned to Public Good, it is just as fearsome in a more positive direction. It is, fundamentally, the same tool in both instances. This reminds me of an old Orwell essay, "A Good Word For The Vicar Of Bray": http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/vicar/english/e_vicar http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/vicar/english/e_vicar > Thibaw, the last King of Burma, was also far from being a good man. He was a drunkard, he had five hundred wives — he seems to have kept them chiefly for show, however — and when he came to the throne his first act was to decapitate seventy or eighty of his brothers. Yet he did posterity a good turn by planting the dusty streets of Mandalay with tamarind trees which cast a pleasant shade until the Japanese incendiary bombs burned them down in 1942. > The poet, James Shirley, seems to have generalised too freely when he said that “Only the actions of the just Smell sweet and blossom in their dust”. Sometimes the actions of the unjust make quite a good showing after the appropriate lapse of time.