I hope the more rational part of you realizes that this wouldn't be good for anyone.

I play D&D and plan to get one to print custom game pieces / figures. Maybe even dice.

I get the lame joke but Win8 has no problem doing this as well.

You get five seats for that $1000.
$200 per seat over 10 years for the full office suite plus unlimited cloud storage is a fucking amazing deal.

The internet is one of the best things humanity has ever done. The ability to carry it around in my hand is worth the tiny little chunk of my soul that Verizon gets each month.

it's a good idea to assume it's not private.

You make some good points but I would rather go the open / less stable route every time. The instability is something that can (and has) improved a great deal over time. Intentional roadblocks meant to keep the user in a restricted playground will only get worse. The stability issue is really a lot like the reliability issue in cars. All the major brands are about the same. Ever since Win7 the only time I have to reboot is when I install updates once a month, if even that often. And reboot times have dropped so far that it's not that much more time than coming out to sleep. My current laptop goes from fully running to fully off and back to fully running in just a few seconds. The user restrictions and lock in never goes away though.

Source? Who did he give it too? More importantly, how involved was he? For Gates it's now his main focus in life and by the end of his life he will have spent a lot more time saving lives than doing whatever it is you hate him for. Your hate has clearly clouded your judgment.

Such a vacuous comment it's hard to know what to say. None of the people you listed can work for free all the time. So just writing checks would mean he gets a lot of the credit because he's making it happen. But the cool thing about Gates is that he's not just writing checks. He's very hands on and has a lot of influence to direct action throughout the world. Yes, those other people deserve a lot of credit too but making sure billions of dollars are spent effectively is harder than it sounds and he will go down in history as someone who did a lot more good than bad with his time on earth.

Started to reply but then I realized you posted AC so you don't deserve a good response.

The MIT license. Are you certain that was your only question?

You're stuck in the past.

Bill is too busy saving lives to care about what you think of him. MS is still making money hand over fist and doing an impressive job adjusting to the changing landscape it finds itself on. They are clearly not going the way of Sun any time soon.

Um, that first quote is mine but the second one isn't so you can't really accuse me of backpedaling. I was chiming in with my own opinion, not agreeing 100% with the above AC.

My point was that just because we can't solve the whole thing we shouldn't give up on trying to make improvements.

Most gamers are over 18 so there's no reason to suspect that this is just the work of kids. But even for the kids there are plenty of things that can be done and you're presenting a false choice in thinking that if we can't "solve" the problem than we shouldn't try. We'll never solve it but through education and public discourse we can reduce the problem for sure.

Nice attempt at a side-step. Obviously children would be treated differently under the law. It's the adults that do this that should be arrested and prosecuted / fined. And we need to very clearly teach children that this type of behavior is wrong.