The Softening of a Software Man 617
theodp writes to tell us that New York Magazine has an interesting editorial stating that no one is afraid of Microsoft anymore. The article argues that Microsoft has noticeably been adrift in the wake of Gates' philanthropy, which some cynics suspect is a Rockefeller-like attempt to 'fumigate his fortune' as he makes a play for the history books. From the article: "Like the robber barons, Bill Gates has moved from trying to take over the world to trying to save it."
Yeesh.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Um... (Score:4, Insightful)
I still think a good case can be made for Steve Jobs being the antichrist. Without ever making himself look evil he manages to tempt countless people into sin through techno-lust, and the vitriol exhibited by rabid Mac-lovers towards basically anyone who disagrees with them in the slightest can hardly be thought of as "natural" hatred.
Re:Yeesh.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Adrift? Try sinking. (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess now to stay afloat they're going to have to come up with some good ideas other than selling people antivirus software to patch up their crappy vulnerable OS. That was a good idea, if only for the irony.
Re:Yeesh.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Is giving ~2% of your fortune to charity each year really that amazing?
It is more worthy than all of the other donations by people, many of whom might be donating a lot more money in percentage terms, or actually donating their time to the cause?
It's good however, because you don't hear much about other mega-rich people giving to charity. Maybe they do, but don't claim as much publicity from it? And ~2% of a mega-fuck-load is still a fuck-load (20 kilo-fuck-loads!).
"Some Cynics" (Score:2, Insightful)
Really, who else do you know other than maladjusted computer geeks really care that much about Bill Gates? What he does with his fortune is almost hardly noticed by the general public, until this year. And very few people would call Gates a robber baron at all.
The fixation with Bill Gates and Microsoft on slashdot is really unhealthy. You people need to get out more.
Nothing to fumigate (Score:5, Insightful)
Watch my left hand... (Score:1, Insightful)
As pieterh said a while ago: "Watch my left hand... as my right hand takes your wallet."
Re:Perhaps Bill Gates really ISN'T the antichrist. (Score:4, Insightful)
If nature did have a way of weeding out idiots, you'd be in serious trouble!
No more enemy? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Yeesh.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yeesh.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Yeesh.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, well, I've just taken everything you had, so now I have more than you, but I gave some small fraction of it to charity, so that's alright then. You are scum because you aren't giving anything of what you don't have anymore to charity. To the almshouse with you where they might deign to bestow the charity of what was once yours upon you, derived from my own generosity.
You're welcome. I'm here to help you after all and will accept your Man of the Year Award with gracious humility.
Thoreau and Twain each had some rather pithy words for that sort of behavior.
KFG
Trying to ease his mind? (Score:1, Insightful)
A killer does not become better in any way by saving equal amounts of lives as he has killed. Most of the problems in the third world is because of us in the developed world. We have made extreme amounts of money by exploiting them. The tiny fractions of it we "give" back is a mere drop in the ocean and nothing to bang our chests about.
Bill Gates sucks whatever he does because of what he has done to set back computing years just for profit. Nothing can change that unless he gets a time machine.
Re:Yeesh.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Bill Gates has given more to charity than anyone EVER.
I think the guy deserves a little credit
No. Giving more than anyone ever (I think once you take inflation into account, that isn't true) means a large impact to the world. It does not mean a large impact to Bill Gates.
Is it really generous when he can give ten times as much without even noticing the money's gone?
Maybe it has dawned on him... (Score:3, Insightful)
Naaahhhhh!!! What was I thinking?
So why is that a troll? (Score:1, Insightful)
Well, whether or not that was what he was trying to do, it worked. The parent and grandparent post demonstrate this nicely. Defenses of Gates on the basis of his philanthropy are immediate and "insightful". Rejections of the idea that money should be able to buy respect are "trolls".
I am posting this as AC. Why? Because apparently what Gates' billions to charity have bought is this: You are now a 'troll' on slashdot if you criticize Gates' motives. After all, those billions may have come from means which were destructive, unethical, illegal, or possibly outright theft; but, because he gave some of it back, it was all Good in the end. Bill Gates, the modern Robin Hood. Leeching from the computer users and industries of the world, and giving to the poor or AIDS patients or what not. How can we possibly question the motives of a noble hero such as this?
Truly, you can buy anything, if you are a smart shopper. $97 million to build a house, $10 or 20 billion (I've lost count of exactly how big the Gates Foundation is) to buy the hearts and minds of slashdot. At least we do not come cheap.
Buying karma (Score:3, Insightful)
The $20M he gave to a University library buys him naming rights. $20M to Bill Gates is pocket change. How much "hurt" did he feel making that contribution? About as much as a regular guy would feel if he gave a quarter to charity. To Bill, $20M to see your name written over a prestigeous library entrance is cheap.
When he makes big donations in Inda or whatever it is a nice way of buying a good impression and some positive hype when they want to staff up Microsoft India. It is also a nice way of imposing some control. Don't piss off the guy with the dough or he might take his favors elsewhere.
Bill's Gains (Score:2, Insightful)
But now he is being generous. Should he be given credit for that? Maybe the donations should be made in the name of the public from which he has obtained his fortune while giving nothing in return.
Re:Adrift? Try sinking. (Score:1, Insightful)
Double my investment on stock that isn't that much of a risk? I'd be pretty happy about that.
A much riskier investment would have been this one:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=AAPL&t=5y [yahoo.com]
Riskier -- but owning that stock would have paid off a lot more. Risky as its based almost around a single vision (i.e., if Jobs had ended up going the wrong way with his cancer treatment last year vs. if Bill Gates quit Microsoft entirely to devote his life to working in a soupkitchen in Africa and was eaten by wild boars).
All in all, M$ is doing pretty well...I wouldn't give them any money -- but if one of my investments funds were investing in the technology sectors I'd be a little miffed if they didn't have a good bit going towards that company).
Re:Yeesh.. (Score:4, Insightful)
"Yeesh" Indeed (Score:2, Insightful)
Remember, it's your money he's giving away. By self-serving use and abuse of the US legal system, he stole hundreds of billions of dollars from people all over the world. He was convicted of this in a US court.
It's great that he's giving some of this money to charity. Personally, I'd rather have the few hundred dollars he's got from me back so that I could choose how to spend it myself. I'd also rather have the businesses he ruined back, and the generation of computer programmers he ruined back, so that the US could be another 15 years ahead techologically.
Excuse me if I don't light any candles for the man.
Re:Yeesh.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't fall for his hypocricy. (Score:2, Insightful)
I disagree. In the New Testament we read about a poor old widow who gave to the temple a couple of coins, which was what she needed to live. Relatively speaking, she gave much more than any millionaire could give.
On the other hand, if Bill Gates wants to become a good person, WHY DOESN'T HE GIVE US BACK WHAT HE FREAKING STOLE!?
I mean the monopolic practices, forcing us to pay licenses for Windows, etc etc etc.
It's as if a rich man exploited poor men but gave a lot of money to the church. You don't become a good person by stealing and giving a little to the poor. You become a good person by NOT STEALING in the first place.
Life is not 1-dimensional like that (Score:5, Insightful)
Why don't we judge companies based on the company's behaviour, and judge individuals based on the individual's behaviour?
Why don't we stop imagining that somehow a multibillion dollar company is still largely a projection of one man's personality?
Why don't we acknowledge that contributing to charity does not absolve anyone of responsibility they may have for wrongs they committed in the past?
Why don't we acknowledge that a person's psyche is not one-dimensional.. that an individual can do good in some contexts and bad in other contexts?
Does that sound reasonable?
-Laxitive
Re:Perhaps Bill Gates really ISN'T the antichrist. (Score:4, Insightful)
Those people are idiots, too, right, Gravis Zero?
Re:Yeesh.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Are you kidding me? I agree that Windows isn't the best choice out there, but do you seriously think computers would have developed as far as they have if it weren't for Microsoft?
Open-source software is a relatively recent development in computing. Apple is closed-source, Unix is closed source (SCO, anyone?), Microsoft is closed source, OS/2 was closed source. It's the closed-source guys that made computing big. OSS is great now that the market has developed, but the computing industry got big because companies were willing to spend the money to make it big, so that they could make money themselves.
There are very few altruist capitalists. Just about any company that makes an awesome product does it to make money first. Everything else arises out of that.
You are free to ignore me here, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
But to anyone thinks this way, I warn you: some people once thought Netscape and the World Wide Web might make Microsoft irrelevant. Others once thought Java might make Microsoft irrelevant. Some once thought Apple might dethrone Microsoft. Some once thought the Playstation would kill Microsoft. I am willing to concede that the verdict may not be in on the last two points yet, but the XBox 360 is sure making headway in that market, and the iPod, though still the most popular MP3 player, is clearly by NO means secure in its position at this point, as competing music stores AND players are continually nipping at Apple's heels.
But my point is simply this: In EVERY case but the last two, Microsoft successfully thwarted or killed those technologies, sometimes only after quite a while of making blunders. Though it may have taken a couple years, Internet Explorer ultimately killed Netscape. Java, though still widely used, appears to be stagnating, not growing, as
And to anyone who thinks Firefox is dethroning Internet Explorer, check again: last time I checked, Internet Explorer still has AT LEAST more than 60% market share, even according to some of the most Firefox-dominant survey samples out there, like the audience who visits W3Schools. And for all the talk about ActiveX and its security flaws, that doesn't seem to have put much of a dent in its use--there are STILL quite a lot of applications out there on the web that depend heavily on ActiveX, particularly at places like banks and corporate intranets. It's all very well to say Firefox is right not to support ActiveX because of its insecurities, but for anyone who is stuck with a bank or a corporate intranet that requires ActiveX, there is basically no real alternative to Internet Explorer.
I doubt ANYONE in their right mind could seriously say the Apple, Sun, or Netscape are going to dethrone Microsoft anytime soon. Do *NOT* discount Microsoft. They might be down on this one round, but they are by *NO* means out. Last time I checked, they are STILL the dominant desktop OS, with over 90% market share, and the prospects for a successful Vista launch seem to keep getting better all the time. From the looks of it, Win Vista, whether we like it or not, is very likely to wow many people, and help Microsoft reclaim whatever ground they have lost to Apple, Google, Linux, etc.
I also warn you: Microsoft is clearing planning to move all of their MSN properties into Windows Live [live.com]. The next version of Hotmail will be called Windows Live Mail, in keeping with this. Their plan is to integrate Windows Live (formerly MSN) heavily with the Windows operating system, and to market it and position it as *THE* web portal, Web 2.0 widget center (upon which other web applications will be built), and THE gateway to the Internet. By integrating Windows Live into Windows and making it platform-dependent, Microsoft still has a trump card here that Google can only DREAM of having.
Do NOT discount Microsoft--they are STILL a force to be reckoned with, they are STILL in a VERY strong position, and they are STILL very dangerous... Do NOT be lulled into a sense of complacency.
Re:Yeesh.. (Score:5, Insightful)
When he took such an obvious path as creating a nonprofit organization (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) and pumping in record billions of $$$ to avoid tax
I guess you got modded "insightful" by people who are really bad at math.
Donating money to charity does not leave one with more money than one would have had if one didn't donate at all.
If I have 120 dollars and I donate 20, I get taxed on the remaining 100 dollars (let's pretend it's 35%) - so I wind up with 65 dollars.
If I have 120 dollars and I don't donate anything, and I get taxed on the 120 dollars (and let's pretend that the tax rate on 120 dollars is 40%) I wind up with 72 dollars.
So, you see, even after considering the tax benefits, one does not magically wind up with more money after donating than if they didn't.
But, you know - if reality were different, I guess maybe you would have a point.
Re:Yeesh.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Andrew Carnegie gave over $350 million to charity before he died in 1911. Adjusted for inflation that's over $7 billion today. When Gates gives away $7 billion that'll be a real story - indeed Gates might well do this, and may will benefit in the way we can still walk into Carnegie libraries around the world today.
I'm not criticising Gates here - just pointing out that he hasn't, yet, been the most generous philanthropist.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Trying to ease his mind? (Score:0, Insightful)
Wow, I'm glas you can come to such a scientific and provable conclusion! You are a dipshit and a greasy nerd. Seriously, what fucking hypocrites. So into science and math, and the scientific theory on most things, but when it comes to Microsoft you just make up wild accusations and bullshit and try to pass if off as some fact everyone just knows.
Grow up, you fucking nerd, grow up.
Re:Why the personal attacks? (Score:4, Insightful)
Good for Bill and Melinda (Score:2, Insightful)
Even if he didn't give it all away... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not saying people aren't generous but usually that generosity is coaxed, like Bill paying for naming rights, people donating to PBS for the "free gift" that depends on how much you donate and the like.
I know that's neither here nor there but I just see that everyone is bandying about this 2% like it's pocket change they're used to throwing around and having seen the people that try to claim $1 buy-a-heart/star/shamrock charity donations on their taxes I know it's not as common as some people think.
The next time someone complains about Bill ONLY donating 2%, they should try adding up how much they donate (of course, now I'm going to have a string of posts after this from people saying "no, you're wrong, I personally donate 3% and so thus, EVERYONE must be donating 3%")
Re:Perhaps Bill Gates really ISN'T the antichrist. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:"Yeesh" Indeed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Buying karma (Score:4, Insightful)
You are correct. Billg said that he would donate $1 million over 10 years to fight aids in india. He then made a $1billion dollar investment over 4 years to setup microsoft institutions there to fight linux.
He also likes to play tricks with his money. A $25 million donation to kids in need that really equated to being $25 million in printed MS WinME licences. Nothing like printing your own money and claiming to be giving away vast fortunes.
He likes giving away money, you see. Thats why hes the richest man in the world.
Re:Yeesh.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Another thing that you (plural) seem to forget is that most of Bill's billions are not liquid--it's tied up in stock.
Re:Yeesh.. (Score:3, Insightful)
People who want to look good in public eye do good deeds in public ? It doesn't take much to be modded Insighfull around here, now does it ?
Not trying to flame you, just wondering about the person who apparently found a previously unknown insight from your statement...
Robber Barrons (Score:5, Insightful)
And very few people would call Gates a robber baron at all.
The parallels between Gates and the robber barrons of 1880-1920 are pretty obvious. Perhaps it is your healthy non-geek detachment that prevents you from observing it. Gates has profoundly distorted an industry of great promise and gathered tremendous wealth to himself through careful construction of a monopoly. He did so through maniacal competitiveness, and cunning much like Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford. Has he affected history? Certainly. Positively? Doubtful. His legacy is DRM and the anti-virus industry. Like the robber barrons, later in life he chooses to disgorge some of that wealth in a very public way in an effort to whitewash his image. He may leave his name on a couple of buildings, but posterity will see him reviled like his predecessors.
Re:Trying to ease his mind? (Score:4, Insightful)
I actually was around before Microsoft seriously entered the computing market. I remember computers costing $10k (the Apple Lisa). I recall small Unix boxes costing $15k, with the OS adding another couple thousand to that (Sun). I remember dozens of machines with no interoperability (TI 99/4, Atari, TRS 80, Exidy Sorcerer, Apple...)
Microsoft, love it or hate it, established a defacto standard. No one was forced to buy Microsoft products- even counting the "Microsoft Tax", anyone could have easily purchased a Macintosh or a small Unix box. But they didn't, because they were generally over priced and provided little or no advantage for all their extra cost. Every vendor back in the '80s was desperately trying to steal their piece of market share, and the concept of open common standards was effectively non-existent. If anything, Microsoft's dominance encouraged sufficient standardization to make it necessary for company's to actually compete on features and price: if this hadn't happened, I imagine we'd be buying $1200 operating systems for our $8,000 computers today.
I'm truly sick and tired of the people who can't unscrew their heads from their rectums long enough to realize that Microsoft and Bill Gates are no more "evil" than any other company out there. Don't like Microsoft products? Great, use what you want, but shut the hell up about it already.
As far as Gates' generosity being a "new" thing...no, its not. A decade ago, he said he intended to give away 95% of his wealth by the time he retired. This is nothing new. And he sure as heck isn't doing this to impress any of the people here on Slashdot.
Re:Why the personal attacks? (Score:4, Insightful)
So if I stole people's ideas and fortunes, claimed them as my own, and destroyed an entire industry which was flourishing with brilliant ideas until I nearly single-handedly brought it to stagnation, you'd be okay with that so long as I gave 2% of my spoils to charity?
Pardon me while I don't just "get over it".
Re:Perhaps Bill Gates really ISN'T the antichrist. (Score:2, Insightful)
How can you disagree by paraphrasing what I said? I said:
"AIDS is a problem in underdeveloped nations that do not know how or have the means to do sex safely."
no-one deserves to die
Everybody deserves to die, it is a part of life. Don't want to die, be a rock or something.
I'm willing to admit that there's been people who have contracted HIV/AIDS from their own idiocy, but to call it "nature's way of weeding out idiots" is both insensitive and incorrect.
Although I agreed with the "idiots" thesis, I did not use the word. I talked about being unhealthy, uneducated, and unable to have access to decent healthcare.
If you take away the myth that people are better than other animals or even "made in God's image", and just think of us as mammalian animals like we are then you will understand that we are just like other living creatures and subject to the same problems. I've seen diseases an drought take out trees and animals. Oh, thats insensitive and incorrect. I've seen a fluctuation in oxygen in a creek that caused a whole species of fish to die and float to the top. Oh, I'm insensitive and incorrect. These things and others are nature's way of weeding out weak individuals that simply do not fit in the current environment. Humans are clearly not immune to nature. To have a different believe is simply incorrect, but not insensitive.
More people die from the influenza virus in the United States than the AIDS virus. Influenza kills very young and old people. Oh, I'm insensitive and incorrect. I already displayed what the insensitive and incorrect CDC studies have shown as far as the target population that gets and dies from AIDS. They are uneducated and poor people that do risky sex and share needles.
I have no judgment of these people or their actions. Every action has consequences both good and bad. Being educated, wealthy, or healthy does not cause happiness. But being at the bottom of any social group usually does. And those people at the bottom are weaker ones in the current environment.
I do not understand when I go on these frank and factual based posts here about humans that I get moderated all over the spectrum from informative, troll, overrated, and insightful. People seem to prefer to ignore reality.
So go ahead and shoot some dope with the same needle with your friends, and have unprotected anal sex with them, and live it up. Don't come crying to me if you get AIDS.
Re:Yeesh.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Ok, so what are some examples of things that would be sufficient pennance for his misdeeds? You say that erasing third world debt, immunizing about a third of the worlds children against various diseases, funding a cure for AIDS, etc aren't good enough, what would be? Or are his sins unforgivable?
Re:Original Parent isn't far off (Score:3, Insightful)
I have to say that I disagree with this, because the "idiots" in Africa that you mention afterwards are the disease's primary victims, and not being able to find out about these things does not make one an idiot.
For the record, do you know if the "unprotected homosexual contact" figure includes "accidental" (protection failing) cases? Because if not, that group is pretty much fully idiot (except for those who were misled by people that they were in a position to sensibly believe that they could trust, which can't be that many), yes.
Re:Yeesh.. (Score:2, Insightful)
You're telling me that the combined effect of tens of millions dead, added healthcare expences, increased tension over antiviral drug patents, social effects (AIDS is God's cure for fags, etc), and the use of latex gloves in healthcare and condoms during sex is less than the effect of buggy code? Even if that was true, it's rather odd to ignore the fact that Microsoft's errors usually don't kill anyone, while AIDS does.
I understand that in the rest of the world, it's a different story thanks to the AIDS epidemics in the third world. But most of us are not in the third world and few of us know anyone who's likely to be impacted by his efforts.
Ah, so he did bad things to the (relatively) rich and good things for the poor. Since you don't know them, how their lives are affected is irrelevant.
Re:Original Parent isn't far off (Score:5, Insightful)
As usual, the evidence of the ignorant falls somewhat short of being accurate.
You can contract AIDS not just from sharing needles, but from using another junkies' spoon. Too, used needles are all that's available sometimes. Street dealers sell them for convenience sake. They have to ... you can't buy needles in a store. Because that would encourage drug use and frighten churchgoers. There are needle exchanges in major US cities, but they only operate a few hours a week in various locations. Not to mention, many junkies fear they'll be marked by undercover narcs if they pick their rigs up there. It's not that junkies wouldn't use fresh needles if they were available, in fact they're preferable (sharper). They're not, though.
The relatively high percentage of AIDS in the black community is correlated to the relatively high percentage of black men who are incarcerated. One of the great unspokens within the black community is that many men have sex with one another in prison. Before the GNAA chimes in, you should understand many heterosexual men have sex with other men in prison. It's a different world no one can judge unless they've been there. It doesn't help condoms aren't distributed in prison. Homophobia, you understand. Don't want to look gay or anything. Same reason guys don't admit to it, same reason guys don't get tested, same reason guys give it to their girlfriends when they get out. Shame.
As for having unprotected sex being idiotic, if that were true we're all idiots. Well, probably not you. I'll let you in on a little secret, though -- condomless feels better. In the moment, it's pretty easy to convince yourself that you can beat the odds.
Re:Trying to ease his mind? (Score:5, Insightful)
Me too! In fact, I was around before MS entered the computing market, period.
> I remember computers costing $10k (the Apple Lisa).
And you can still spend that (or many times that) if you want. And there were computers that only cost a couple of hundred on the market at the same time. As there are now. So whatcherpoint?
> I remember dozens of machines with no interoperability (TI 99/4, Atari, TRS 80, Exidy Sorcerer, Apple...)
Yup, those were the cheap ones. And I was writing cross-platform apps for those machines with supposedly "no interoperability" at the time! And we did it basically the same way it's done today, with compilers to hide CPU differences, and libraries to hide other system differences. Sure, the overheads associated with cross-platform work made it a non-starter for, say, video games, but for business apps and such, it was clearly, even at the time, the wave of the future.
> Microsoft, love it or hate it, established a defacto standard.
No, IBM established a defacto standard. And, in the process, managed to kill of a lot of the existing market for cross-platform support (anyone remember UCSD Pascal or Fig-Forth?), and, arguably, set the industry back by a decade or more. Microsoft just happened to be lucky enough to be in a position where they were able to hijack the standards created by IBM. People didn't go with Microsoft because it was better (or even very good); they went with Microsoft because it was "IBM-PC compatible".
And, in fact, by the time the PC came along, the small business computing market had already pretty much standardized on CP/M, and Digital Research was already looking at porting CP/M to a new generation of sixteen-bit chips. All the indicators, at the time (before MS came along), were pointing clearly in the direction of cheaper, more powerful computers with more standardized interfaces and APIs. What bucket you were hiding under to believe otherwise I can't imagine!
> Every vendor back in the '80s was desperately trying to steal their piece of market share, and the concept of open common standards was effectively non-existent.
Complete, utter hogwash! How many vendors were supporting CP/M at the time? How many were supporting Unix? Dozens, if not hundreds! I call shenanigans! We even bought one of those Apple Lisa's you mentioned around that time, but we didn't buy it to run LisaOS (or whatever it was called)--we bought it to run BSD! Gee, there was already a FREE cross-platform OS even way back then! Kinda makes you go "hmm", doesn't it?
> As far as Gates' generosity being a "new" thing...no, its not.
No, but Gates' personal generosity towards humanity in general has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with Microsoft's role as an evil, predatory monopoly! My feelings for BG are completely separate from my feelings for MS, and my feelings for MS are that I haven't used any of their software since '98, and hope to never do so again.
MS Isn't Dangerous? (Score:3, Insightful)
MS still takes every opportunity to attack open source software and open standards in general. Look, for instance, at the incredible attack that MS has launched, via it's pet columnists, at Mr. Quinn in Massecheusetts, who had the temerity to recommend that MA insist that the governement switch to software that used open document format, so that MS couldn't force the state to upgrade by changing file formats. Mr. Quinn has probably saved the MA taxpayers, like myself, untold amounts of money, and in return he's been attacked over and over in the press.
MS is patenting everything it can think of, obvious or not, in an attempt to preempt competition. Even if the patents are eventually overturned, they can be used to threaten software and hardware developers, retarding the advancement of technology in all the areas MS is getting patents in.
I think it's more likely that MS will become increasingly dangerous the more that Bill Gates retreats from management of the company. Ballmer has already shown that he is willing to do almost anything to increase the bottom line, legal or not.
MS still needs to be split up. It is still a monopoly and still defies the courts in the U.S. and Europe by continuing it's monopolistic practices.
Re:Original Parent isn't far off (Score:4, Insightful)
Dont forget that Africa is becoming the rape caital of the world. It's pretty tough to get your generic rapist to use a condom.
One in three of the 4,000 women questioned by CIET Africa, non-governmental organisation, said they had been raped in the past year.... In a related survey conducted among 1,500 schoolchildren in the Soweto township, a quarter of all the boys interviewed said that 'jackrolling' - a South African term for recreational gang rape - was fun. [bbc.co.uk]
Re:This doesn't cancel out the source of his money (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone can sell open source software. Many have business models involving selling and servicing repackaged open source software.
If you aren't paying that way, then you pay by contributing back to the efforts of the developers so that improvements may be made, rather than just leeching off their hard work. If you can code, then you code. If you find bugs, you report them. If you have found innovative ways of using the software or can answer questions posted by other users
You encourage others to do the same because one day you may need the help, such as when you're such a dumbfuck that you don't know how to format a simple word document.
But I suppose the high and mighty Caspian, master of English, is way above all that.
Dumbfuck leech.
Re:Um... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bullshit (Score:3, Insightful)