Journal toby's Journal: Stallman: Gates gone, bars remain 2
Thanks to jemarch for linking this commentary by RMS at the BBC News, on the eve of Gates' retirement from Microsoft.
What really matters is not Gates, nor Microsoft, but the unethical system of restrictions that Microsoft, like many other software companies, imposes on its customers.
Many computerists specially hate Gates and Microsoft. They have plenty of reasons.
Microsoft persistently engages in anti-competitive behaviour,
Many users hate the "Microsoft tax", the retail contracts that make you pay for Windows on your computer even if you won't use it.
There's also the Digital Restrictions Management: software features designed to "stop" you from accessing your files freely.
Then there are the gratuitous incompatibilities and obstacles to interoperation with other software.
Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, and the rest, offer you software that gives them power over you. A change in executives or companies is not important. What we need to change is this system.
Time to move on (Score:2)
I guess I'll keep reading Greg Egan, Stan Salthe, Douglas Rushkoff, Tim Flannery, George Monbiot and Paul Graham for now, but I've about stopped expecting anything new from anyone I already know about, not that that lessens the need to change the system.
One side of me knows that Rudd and Obama are each a significant step in the right/left direction, but another side isn't quickly getting over the way the detailed agenda for 2020 was suffocatingly grounded in 20th century assumptions of bureaucratic self-jus
only [wo]men under 30 change the system? (Score:2)
That disqualifies me too.
RMS wrote emacs at 23, GNU manifesto at 32. Torvalds began Linux at 22. Gates and Allen founded Microsoft at 20 and 22 respectively. Page started Google project at 23. Thompson and Ritchie kicked off UNIX at 26 and 28. Mathematica was released when Wolfram was 29.
(I just skimmed the whole of Wolfram's blog while procrastinating work on an ugly PHP site.)
muses... what if Gates and Stallman had simply traded places