This is some of the most ridiculously biased shit I've ever read on HN. Please explain his past misdeeds that are so unforgivable that his $30 odd billion in charitable donations can't even erase.
The money he's spending is extorted from our industry. If you believe the good somehow outweighs the harm, do you also believe that every tech company and every computer user should be robbed and the proceeds used to further help the poor, with no vote and none of the burden being shouldered from outside tech?
It disturbs me that there's still no real restitution sought from people who knowingly, deliberately attack our society's mechanism for allocating most all resources.
I don't think anything erases the past. On the whole, the world is a lot better off for having Bill Gates in it. But just because he's doing a lot of good now doesn't mean the bad he did doesn't count.
He had aggressive business practices? That's what makes him evil? He wanted IE and Windows to win out over Netscape and Linux? Give me a break. That is as mundanely not-evil in the business world as you could get.
"Give me a break" == lazy. Being willfully ignorant of MS's numerous misdeeds is not an argument. And if you don't have all the facts available, perhaps you should refrain from commenting.
I've yet to see a large company that wasn't illegal, immoral, or anti-competitive by the utopian-fairy-nerd standard.
That standard is more immoral than anything Microsoft ever did. It requires companies to kill themselves once they achieve too great a level of success.
But there can still be an order of magnitude difference between what these large companies do. Just because they all fall short of a "utopian-fairy-nerd" standard doesn't mean they're all equally reprehensible!
Reminds me of something pg wrote in "what happened to yahoo"
"It's hard for anyone much younger than me to understand the fear Microsoft still inspired in 1995. Imagine a company with several times the power Google has now, but way meaner. It was perfectly reasonable to be afraid of them."
Every time I buy a computer that has microsoft windows release 'x' installed which I then wipe to install Linux I subsidize Bill Gates' ability to be a philanthropist.
Doesn't it depend on the harm caused by his misdeeds? If his business practices caused $100 billion or more of harm to humanity (by holding back the tech industry), could $30 billion wash that away?
I don't know how you could calculate the cost of Gates' misdeeds in a way that people would agree on, but I find it entirely reasonable that some people feel that the harm far outweighed the giving and that some people feel the opposite.
> I don't know how you could calculate the cost of Gates' misdeeds in a way that people would agree on, but I find it entirely reasonable that some people feel that the harm far outweighed the giving and that some people feel the opposite.
That's interesting. From my perspective of growing up with computers in the 80's and 90's, Microsoft was a net positive for the industry.
They took a really fragmented and immature industry and helped push it to the mainstream and helped allow computers to be a part of pretty much everyone in the first worlds life.
