begin oe_protect.scr
BearItAll <spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
> 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.
If you cannot see the real goal behind such statements, then you are
a marketing man's dream. Indeed, the "early windows" versions were
able to detect competing forms of DOS and refuse to run on them, even
though there was no significant difference between them even from a
programming perspective. There was so little difference between MSDOS
and DRDOS because the original MSDOS was stolen, of course.
So the whole argument was rather moot, since porting between CPM and
DRDOS in the earliest days was relatively trivial, since they were
the same thing. DOSPLUS, there are still binaries available, will run
both DOS and CPM86 binaries on the same x86 machine. Again, there were
perfectly good solutions around.
More importantly, of course, Bill Gates was desperate to kill Atari
and Commodore, both of whom had far superior computer designs, with
far superior operating system environments, far better multimedia
capabilities, and so on. Back then, programmes like cubase were first and
foremost available for non-PC platforms, because they were so superior.
I'll never recall seeing Bill Gates commenting on a competing entity
of some kind, and uttered one of the best bits of marketing FUD I've
ever witnessed in response to a journlists question, "... but it won't
be comptible!" He didn't say compatible with what, of course, which
was one of the truly clever things about the remark.
Even as the importance of Atari and Commodore began to wane in the
consumer space, as PC graphics and sound began to approach the quality
and capability of Amiga and St, the Acorn risc machines continued in
popularity, especially in education. Apple, of course, also never
disappeared, and OS2 came and went, and later, so did BeOS.
The void left by the lack of any remaining competition began to be
filled by free software offerings, although it has to be said that it
took many years before they were truly able to offer the same degree of
visual appeal as the Apple machines could. However, in all this time,
linux has been successfully ported to all of the mentioned architectures,
with its packages liberally ported with them. The Acorn Risc morphed
into Arm, of course, and now powers everything from phones to full-blown
servers and all kinds of things in between.
So, from a programmers perspective, all you need to do now is write java
or even native linux, and your package will be portable across all
manner of architectures. Bill Gates was solely about building a
monopoly in order to become amazingly rich. Let's not confuse that with
any other "laudable goals". Of course, in the world of extreme
capitalism, there's nothing wrong with wanting to become very rich, and
I'm not arguing that there is, merely, I'm arguing that Bill Gates did
what he did quite deliberately, did it very well indeed, although in the
process, held back computing a good decade or more.
--
| Mark Kent -- mark at ellandroad dot demon dot co dot uk |
Jones' Motto:
Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate.
|
|
