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Bill Gates' Philanthropic Impact Put in Perspective

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Re: Bill Gates' Philanthropic Impact Put in Perspective

#121

Post by WalterBright »

sametmax wrote: post #85
adventured wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gates didn't take his wealth, he created it and earned it. Having a monopoly isn't illegal in the US. Making billions of dollars with a monopoly is not illegal in the US. The abuses in the market that Microsoft was found guilty of, they were punished for. What else are you asking for exactly? Gates doesn't need any forgiveness. His former company's wrongs have already been accounted for - a long time ago - through an…

No but corruption is illegal. Stealing is illegal. And many things he did while legal, were highly immoral, such as: lying, cheating, investing capital in weapon makers and companies doing the opposite of what he is defending now, tax optimization, heavy lobying, retaining a huge part of capital and not letting it flows in the economy, abusing monopoly, patent trolls (and other kind of extorsions), censorship, helpin…

> patent trolls

Microsoft has probably been the least aggressive of the larger software companies in the use of patents. While Gates ran it, I don't recall them ever using patents to shut down competitors. They did collect a "war chest" of patents, but as a defensive "mutually assured destruction" strategy.

Microsoft was famously sued by Apple over "look and feel" copyrights. After that, who could blame them for amassing a large patent portfolio?

Re: Bill Gates' Philanthropic Impact Put in Perspective

#122

Post by WalterBright »

mcguire wrote: post #97
strommen wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Convicted monopolist" really doesn't have much of a ring to it. Especially when the only thing his company was ever found guilty of was bundling a web browser with the OS...

How many copies of Windows have you paid for but never used? I have been running Linux on my personal machines since the early '90s. I try not to think about it.

There are many apps on my iphone that came bundled with it that I never use.

I'm a bit surprised. Most people in the 90's that I knew who ran Linux either repurposed an old machine to it that would otherwise have been scrap, or assembled a machine from parts. In neither case did they buy a Windows license for it.

I remember an Amazon employee telling me that it was hard to buy a Linux machine without Windows on it. I pointed out that Amazon at the time was selling a Linux machine buyable with "one click".

Anybody could make and sell CPUs without a license from Microsoft. It wasn't hard at all (just buy the components in bulk). Nor was it illegal. The issue was that people wanted to buy Windows machines.

Re: Bill Gates' Philanthropic Impact Put in Perspective

#124

Post by mike2477 »

brent_noorda wrote: post #19
mike2477 wrote: post #2

Hey there, data geeks! I am doing research on the rise of social entrepreneurship and got sidetracked by what a badass Bill Gates is. I found out that his foundation is 4x larger than the next largest private foundation in the US. And if you add up the wealth pledged as a part of The Giving Pledge it is 10x larger than that. I compiled The Giving Pledge data on my own by researching net worths of each pledgee. Planni…

The Gates data is inspirational. Glad you put that in perspective. However, we need to see more data on the impact of the Giving Pledge, and whether it has led to more giving. In your chart, the assumption is that this money is more than would have been given without the Pledge. Also, the comparison to amount pledged (most of which will eventually make its way into foundations that will spread the money on their own…

Unfortunately I don't think that data is available. But from what I understand it has led to more giving. See this article - http://fortune.com/2010/06/16/the-600-billion-challenge/

Re: Bill Gates' Philanthropic Impact Put in Perspective

#125

Post by mike2477 »

throwaway_xx9 wrote: post #7

Before you lionize a convicted monopolist ... 1) The USA tax code encourages wealthy people to create foundations. The money in the foundation is still controlled by them and has tax benefits. 2) In other countries, wealthy people are taxed to provide social services like education and healthcare. In the USA, they're not - the capital gains rate of 15% is basically a round-off error compared to 90% last century. 3) F…

I think it's a little outlandish to suggest that Bill Gates started the Gates Foundation in order to make more money or save on tax breaks.

Did he do it for his ego? Maybe. But it'd be hard to find someone who has done great work who didn't do it for their ego.

Being a skeptic in an internet forum is easy. Solving problems that The Gates Foundation has set out to solve isn't. I'll continue to lionize those who do the latter.

Re: Bill Gates' Philanthropic Impact Put in Perspective

#126

Post by bcook »

forgetsusername wrote: post #94
sametmax wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because my aunt stopped beating his child after 15 years and started to work in a dog shelter, she is an inspiration to me ? Err... no.

> Because my aunt stopped beating his child It's beyond ridiculous to compare anything that Gates did to physical violence . He had a few vicious, harmful business tactics. His overall benefit to society, especially if you include his philanthropic work, is likely beyond what most people here will ever achieve.

I dunno if it's rediculous... anyone who struggles to improve theirself should be applauded.

Some of us are innately more immoral/moral.

Re: Bill Gates' Philanthropic Impact Put in Perspective

#127

Post by mcguire »

WalterBright wrote: post #122
mcguire wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many copies of Windows have you paid for but never used? I have been running Linux on my personal machines since the early '90s. I try not to think about it.

There are many apps on my iphone that came bundled with it that I never use. I'm a bit surprised. Most people in the 90's that I knew who ran Linux either repurposed an old machine to it that would otherwise have been scrap, or assembled a machine from parts. In neither case did they buy a Windows license for it. I remember an Amazon employee telling me that it was hard to buy a Linux machine without Windows on it. I…

The issue was that people wanted to buy Windows machines and Microsoft's licenses said that, if a company wanted to sell any copies of Windows, then every machine they sold had to have a copy of Windows installed. There were very few pre-installed Linux vendors (and still are) prior to the Netscape lawsuit, when Microsoft purportedly dropped the requirement.

I never really repurposed any old machines; I've always been a Unix guy, so I went from an old Amiga to Linux as the first desktop Unix I could get. (I have a floppy with 0.99pl14, the first kernel I ever built, here somewhere...)

I've also built my share of machines, but that never really worked for laptops. Plus, I'm old and tired.

Re: Bill Gates' Philanthropic Impact Put in Perspective

#128

Post by prodigal_erik »

WalterBright wrote: post #120
prodigal_erik wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we put aside that the money isn't his, he kneecapped better products with such ferocity that a generation later our industry is still struggling to make up for the lost progress.

> lost progress Actually, MS-DOS was the first more or less standardized platform across diverse computers, which enabled software developers to develop for a market several orders of magnitude larger than what had existed before. The result was an explosion of software being developed. I don't see how this retarded progress.

Both CP/M and MS-DOS enabled portable code that runs on various hardware, but devs wrote software that required PC-compatible hardware anyway because sometimes it was a lot faster to bypass the OS.

MS got market share by being cheaper, and once the network effect was in their favor they kept it by threatening OEMs who dared sell anything else to willing customers.

Re: Bill Gates' Philanthropic Impact Put in Perspective

#129

Post by JoeAltmaier »

prodigal_erik wrote: post #128
WalterBright wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lost progress Actually, MS-DOS was the first more or less standardized platform across diverse computers, which enabled software developers to develop for a market several orders of magnitude larger than what had existed before. The result was an explosion of software being developed. I don't see how this retarded progress.

Both CP/M and MS-DOS enabled portable code that runs on various hardware, but devs wrote software that required PC-compatible hardware anyway because sometimes it was a lot faster to bypass the OS. MS got market share by being cheaper, and once the network effect was in their favor they kept it by threatening OEMs who dared sell anything else to willing customers.

CP/M and MS-DOS weren't really an 'operating system' in the sense that they didn't mediate application access to system resources. They didn't let two apps share even fundamental devices like the clock, timer interrupts, networks, serial ports and on and on. In fact they didn't support multiple apps much at all.

I would call both of them 'monitors' or something. Operating System is way to ambitious a name for what they did.

Re: Bill Gates' Philanthropic Impact Put in Perspective

#130

Post by [deleted] »

prodigal_erik wrote: post #128
WalterBright wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lost progress Actually, MS-DOS was the first more or less standardized platform across diverse computers, which enabled software developers to develop for a market several orders of magnitude larger than what had existed before. The result was an explosion of software being developed. I don't see how this retarded progress.

Both CP/M and MS-DOS enabled portable code that runs on various hardware, but devs wrote software that required PC-compatible hardware anyway because sometimes it was a lot faster to bypass the OS. MS got market share by being cheaper, and once the network effect was in their favor they kept it by threatening OEMs who dared sell anything else to willing customers.

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