So I just read Bill Gates’ 1976 Open Letter To Hobbyists, in which he whines about not making more money from his software. You know, instead of being proud of making software that people wanted to use. And then the bastard went on and made proprietary licences for software the industry standard, holding back innovation and freedom for decades. What a douche canoe.
Obviously Bill Gates is a household name and in the tech community everyone knows who is Steve Ballmer. However not many people know who Paul Allen is even though he was one of the founder of Microsoft at the very start. In 1982 Paul Allen was diagnosed with cancer and Bill and Steve were worried that if Paul died the shares of the company were going to someone else. While Paul was literally getting cancer treatment, Bill and Steve were scheming to dilute the shares of the company to wrestle the control of the company away Paul. Fortunately for Paul he survived the cancer. It really doesn’t put Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer in very good light though. I remember reading about this from Robert X. Cringely’s blog about two decades ago and I heard Paul Allen wrote about his version of this story in his memoir before his death.
Edit: I tried to find the original Robert X. Cringely’s story from back in 2006 but looks like that link is broken but he did referenced it in 2011 when Paul Allen’s book was released.
I really don’t get how opinions on intellectual property and its “theft” turn 180 whenever AI is mentioned.
ai is the rich stealing from us, piracy is usually us taking it from the rich.
AI is theft in the same way that all private property theft. It isnt the piracy of media, it’s the alienation of labor from its product, and withholding it for profit.
All private property is theft? Lmao go back to your cave tankie
yes.
Sees an anarchist
“Tankie”
???
tbf that’s also the tankie view about it.
And piracy is actual enjoyment of art made by hardworking devs who unfortunately work for multi billion dollar companies T-T
One day chat got won’t work without a paid subscription…
Intellectual property as a concept is a cancer to humanity, and we’d be in a much better world without it.
This is shy they want Wikipedia and internet archive, etc, killed off. They have it for their training data but they won’t have a profitable model via paid subscriptions without a monopoly on information.
And for any of the people saying “he changed”.
One of his most recent “philanthropic” ventures was to partner with Nestle (good start) to “modernize and increase yields” of the dairy industries in impoverished countries.
The two organizations then sold modern (likely non-servicable) equipment and entrenched them in corporate supply chain systems geared towards export and making it much harder to trade locally (not sure how that part worked, but was in what I read).
For a grand total of… 1% increased dairy yields.
Then 3-4 years later they pulled out, leaving heavily indebted farmers without the corporate supply chains and delivery systems they were forced to switch to, and making it very difficult to switch back to the old ways of working, so they can’t sell nearly as much locally.
Who do you think will buy up those farms when the farmers go bankrupt and have to sell ar rock bottom prices.
His work on malaria in Africa focused on bed nets to the explicit exclusion of larvacide control of mosquitoes. Millions of preventable cases over the last 30 years.
Then there’s the circumcision to fight aids.
Guy’s a fuckwit.
He is doing what the robber barons did, they are trying to clear their name before they die.
He’s a total ideologue.
Did you also read that he taught himself code by reading out print outs in the trash? He wanted to close that ability to learn. Shut that open stuff down and make licenses, while he himself learned from others.
Didn’t he come from a stupidly rich family and had access to a computer (at a time when it was like having access to a helicopter) whenever he wanted to learn and fiddle around? Isn’t that where he got the print outs?
No. He’s a nepo baby.
Yup. His dad i believe was a renowned lawyer.
With connections to the Rockefeller family. Also his mom was the one who convinced IBM to give Bill the contract for MS-DOS (which he bought from some other guy).
yup. It was originally QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System). I believe he ripped the guy off when he bought it? Not sure
He’s still the same sociopath as always, except now with a savior complex. Giving away all his money, is he? His foundation has been around 25 years and he still has $100b+ net worth. A single individual shouldn’t have that much power, and the fact that he still voluntarily wields it while virtue signaling affirms every negative opinion of him. Even if he were the benevolent billionaire his PR campaign would have us believe he is, such a net worth should be reserved for governments where it’s spread across multiple agencies that have checks and balances and are accountable to voters. I don’t trust any individual with that much power, though I’d trust any random person off the street over anyone ruthless enough to become a billionaire.
He have no life
We all know that every billionaire is a horrible person. They can’t be anything else.
There is no such thing as an innocent billionaire.
You don’t get to a billionn without exploiting people along the way.
People or natural ressources. Even if it’s on stock trade, someone had to create that worth - and those who created it, didn’t get it…
Buying low and selling high is fundamentally taking advantage of other peoples losses.
ABAB
Warren Buffet is ok in my book.
And in retrospect it’s too bad more people didn’t steal from Microsoft so that it failed as a business.
Bill Gates spent a lot of his pro years running a bad company quite well, and exploiting a dominant position in the market that any soulless biz guy would love to have.
He seemed to get a conscience around the time he stopped running the show, and seems to be different while not regretting his behavior in that phase.
I think we can decide he was a bit of a cock back then, while still noting he’s done some good work since. We are nuanced enough, right?
He seemed to get a conscience around the time he stopped running the show
It was all a show. His “philanthropy” was about exploiting farmers in other countries.
He’s still the same self-serving prick, just that he’s trying to buy himself some karma whilst channeling his riches through his own foundations.
The Behind The Bastards postcast episode would suggest otherwise
I love that show. When you compare him to other billionaires he’s not the worst. I think Jeff bezos does more harm. He has an episode too
God you hit the nail on the head, and why I’m getting very annoyed here on Lemmy. People refuse to have nuanced takes and just comment incessantly about how people are evil and doing anything makes you a bad person. Turns out people are nuance, and we can judge them as such. You can say he did some terrible things to make Microsoft successful while also saying he has done some very good things with his fortune. It is not black and white.
People are nuanced, billionaires aren’t just people, they’re a distillate of oppression. The amount of wealth and power people like Gates have is perverse, obscene, and unsustainable. With power comes responsibility, if that responsibility feels unfair, give up the power, he could decide to drop everything and feed the hungry.
Lemmy is dogmatic yes, and sometimes that’s really fucking annoying but billionaires aren’t people like you and me, they are disgustingly greedy to the point it is abusive to not just individuals but millions of people.
Dude got divorced because his wife found out about his involvement with Epstein.
Some things aren’t nuanced at all. Some crimes and shittiness cannot be made up for.
Its not black and white to you but people have different values so him throwing billions of dollars at charity does not effect his choice to buy up farm land and potentially ruin innovation in the computing space.
These are not my opinions just saying why someone would act like it is black and white
Your take is more nuanced than most I see here and I appreciate that, see the other comment as a prime example.
I suppose I did see “ABAB” so I suppose you would be talking about those comments and I agree that is infuriating
It’s just every thread man, every one of them devolves into it and I’m so tired. It’s quite literally like the Good Place where even the act of buying a tomato will get people raging in the comments about how apparently you support climate change, slavery, and every other bad thing involved in the growing of it. Or, hear me out, I just bought a tomato. I’m just so tired of it here
I’m just so tired of it here
Have you tried asking a mod to unlock your prison cell and let you leave?
Maybe pick a billionaire that wasn’t a frequent flyer of the Lolita Express to have this epiphany.
Seriously. He is a deeply bad evil person that paid a lot of money for propaganda, and you fell for it.
Some of the charity is self-serving, e.g. eradicating diseases means he’s less likely to catch them (and really any billionaire not funnelling funds to pandemic prevention etc. is being moronic), and founding charter schools on land he owns so over the life of the school they pay more in rent for the lease than they cost to build is just a tax dodge. Most billionaires are just so evil that they won’t spend money on themselves if other people who aren’t paying also benefit, so in comparison, Gates’ better ability to judge what’s in his interests makes him look good.
He sold his first software before it was even finished to his own unuversity.
He saved Apple to avoid an antitrust trial.
It’s just business right?
He didn’t even write that software, he had to buy it from someone else because his own version sucked.
He and colleagues wrote an interpreter to use BASIC on the Altair system. They didn’t write basic from scratch
He sold his first software before it was even finished to his own unuversity.
What drives me crazy is when I hear this fact being cited as a positive thing that makes him a role model.
It is a very good sales person. But he didn’t understood how could the network (or Internet) change the world, even with his Windows monopole. He had Encarta and lost it, without reusing it, to Wikipedia.
Watch the TV movie from the late 90s “Pirates of Silicon Valley” which pretty much paints both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as really shitty people. I mean just look at what Gates did with the Altair. Said he had an operating system, didn’t have an operating system, and what have you.
Then there’s the whole Xerox Park thing where neither Apple nor Microsoft would be where they’re at today without the engineers at Xerox who were pretty much forced to hand over their stuff because Xerox execs didn’t see value in a GUI and Mouse. Gates and Jobs both were more than happy to go in there and pillage what was developed in order to create Windows and The Macintosh/MacOS
*Xerox PARC. It’s an acronym for Palo Alto Research Center.
Yeah, that’s a good one, and I also enjoyed Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography. Stories like Jobs getting a bonus when Wozniak was able to design a board with fewer chips and then not mentioning the extra money to Woz are perfect examples of how sociopaths like Jobs and Gates operate. It’s sad that ruthless charlatans like them who exploit the true geniuses and innovators are allowed to accrue so much money and power in our society.
Yep I remember that movie, but read Steve Levys Hackers. Gates was always a douch. I also read the letter he wrote. I think it was an opinion piece in a newsletter.
Well yes.
Being a Billionaire should be criminalized
It should be classified as a sign of mental illness. If I had half of a billion dollars I wouldn’t work another day in my life and the general public would never hear from me. These fuckers have more money than they could ever spend and still desperately want more.
i don’t see the point. It really is fucking pointless. They will NEVER spend billions in their entire fucking life, and yet they want more. More money. More money. So much more money. We need to take after star trek and abolish money
I kinda compare it to semi truck weigh stations. I found out some time ago that if the math works out that a truck got from one weigh station to another too fast the driver can get a speeding ticket since its assumed they broke the law getting there. Apply that to money. If a person accumulates too much money, it should just be assumed that person broke laws getting it and they should be severly fined (like, most of it).
They’re not assuming anything, they are doing calculus.
i tried reading that article. I am waaaaaaaaay too dumb to understand it
It does not have to be your cup of tea, but for the record, reading math does not require being smart so much as being patient.
For the record, i literally said “if the math works out” 😁
I’m a little disappointed this wasn’t a link to the film strip we saw in high school. The cop drawling “Now this here is Rolle’s theorem…” is classic.
You can be a billionaire if you are willing to pay a million per month as taxes.
That’s a rate of only 1.2% per year, was that your intention ?
oh man. Remember when the ultrawealthy were getting taxed like 80%? Those were the days
No, if he is earning a billion a year that’s too low. But most billionaire have familial wealth and might be earning a few millions in a month. I don’t mind taking a million or two off of it even if he is not earning anything.
Now the only thing I will say is that Bill Gates is giving away much of his fortune and yes it may be to his benefit to a point however other people are actually benefiting from him giving it away. Bill Gates even admits that most of what he did when he was younger was driven out agreed. However he is doing quite a bit to try to change that and make up for that.
His donation pledge was more of a flex because he’s increased his net worth more than he has donated. Also, people who were friends with Epstein should not get to decide where that money goes.
Link.
Bill Gates’ 1976 Open Letter To Hobbyists
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/Bill_Gates_Letter_to_Hobbyists_ocr.pdf
His mother was an influential person on the board of directors of several firms. She met with John Opel, who was the IBM chairman, and secured her son’s Microsoft contract with IBM in the 1980s, where it then became dominant and made her a ton of money.
It’s vested interests, and who you know.
His mother came from money, being the daughter of a banker, and the granddaughter of a banker. His father was a lawyer who founded a law firm focused on corporate law and technology law. Given that his mom knew Opel personally, and his dad was a technology lawyer, is it any surprise that Gates’ first contract with IBM was so incredibly friendly to Microsoft’s interests?
In addition, IBM was under pressure at that point because it was being sued for antitrust violations by the US government. That limited how aggressive it could be in new contracts without drawing extra attention. In other words, the antitrust effort from the US government took power away from IBM and allowed for new companies to flourish. Then about 20 years later, Microsoft was sued for its own illegal use of its monopoly (a trial at which Bill Gates lied on the stand, and where Microsoft falsified evidence), and this work to limit the reach of Microsoft allowed for the Internet to flourish and led directly to the rise of companies like Google and Amazon. It’s now time for another round of antitrust to allow more companies to flourish – only hopefully this time the antitrust efforts don’t fade out and are aggressively pursued year after year so we don’t get more shitty monopolies making things awful.
Hear hear. I had real hopes for Lina Khan during Biden’s term, but that seemed to have petered out to nothing. Let’s see if something happens once the monster is out of power
Lina Khan is now co-chair of Zohran Mamdani’s transition team!
Yeah, I read that he was a nepo baby. Also, people say “But he dropped out of university to start Microsoft.”
He dropped out of fucking Harvard. His life was easy as piss from the get-go.
Is everyone at Harvard a nepo baby or has definitely had an easy life? I don’t understand your argument.
Yes, aside from a few scholarship kids, the Ivy League schools, and especially Harvard and Yale, were specifically built and continue to this day to be schools for the children of the elite.
It’s a reasonable assumption that a family that could send their child to Harvard in the 70s was very well off already.
