Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> Gates Foundation's 'dirty secret'
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | Mr Gates personal ideological view is that knowledge should be treated
> | as property, and that the owners should always seek monopoly-rents
> | (royalties) and he's said to direct the Gates foundation to mirror
> | this ideology, harming the very people he is trying to help.
> |
> | [...]
> |
> | In my ideal world, we could turn Gates ideology into honest
> | philanthropy, but I'm skeptical that a man who became the richest
> | man on the planet via societal misinformation around the nature of
> | knowledge is going to turn around any time soon.
> `----
>
> http://p2pnet.net/story/10944
>
I wouldn't say that Bill became the richest man on the planet because of
'societal misinformation'. I'd say we were very informed in the time of DOS
and early Windows. We all knew what was going on. The multiple platforms
that we once had to program for, with the high development costs involved,
were being merged to one client platform. That was Bill's orriginal aim, I
remember a fair amount of that big interview he did, maybe was around the
time of Win2 launch, he wanted the programmers to have a single platform to
write for because it would have meant more time could be spent on
developing ideas rather than bashing code to fit every platform available.
It was a reasonable aim too. I can't imagine that even Bill could have
thought then that that particular PC design would take off the way it did.
The product was a good one, it had a way to go but in the end DOS machines
and early Windows machines were winning the battle of the desktop because
they were the best option around, for many of the applications their were
used for.
It was after the initial stages when people realised that MS was destroying
not only competition but also inovation with their slash-n-burn approach.
So if there was 'societal misinformation' involved, then really it applied
to Bill because how could he possibly have known in those early days that
MS Dos/Win were going to take over the world. Later, once he realised the
posibility of that goal and headed for it with ruthless efficiency, thats a
different matter.
Lets face it, if MS Win had been safe and secure from scratch, if it had not
been vulnerable to virus's and hack attacks, then Linux wouldn't stand a
chance as a desktop machine. This is why I'm with the Linuxmen who push and
shove when it comes to security, hammering on the head of those who come
into forums with the old 'I log in as root, its a matter of choice' and
other such nonsense. We can't relax on Linux's greatest attraction.
It undoubtedly still would have been taken up by us UNIX folk, because it
made a really good platform to test code/scripts away from the main
servers, so likely would have still developed as server. It may well have
still carried on as a UNIX client, many UNIX folk were doing that anyway,
because the third party stuff to allow that on MS Win always cost a fortune
and was always limited in some way, while of cause Linux is a natural.
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