EDIT: Also, did Bill Gates steal anything? Manipulation and monopolies are fundamentally wrong, but they do not amount to stealing. IF they do, then the Carnegies and Rockefellers were 'stealing' as well. Maybe, by your logic, we should take away all those libraries Carnegie built too?
> As more lives and communities are destroyed by the system that creates vast amounts of wealth for the few, the more heroic it sounds to “give back.” It’s what I would call “conscience laundering” — feeling better about accumulating more than any one person could possibly need to live on by sprinkling a little around as an act of charity. But this just keeps the existing structure of inequality in place. The rich sleep better at night, while others get just enough to keep the pot from boiling over. Nearly every time someone feels better by doing good, on the other side of the world (or street), someone else is further locked into a system that will not allow the true flourishing of his or her nature or the opportunity to live a joyful and fulfilled life.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/27/opinion/the-charitable-in...
None of us know much or anything at all about the ethics of Gates, I think it's even unfair to smear his name with Epstein's unless there's actual evidence/allegations of something (Epstein did seek out tychoons, after all, perhaps he was slowly working up to enticing Gates into something compromising?).
> I generally prefer people not to steal and undermine society in the first place.
Wow, what a question! Some would argue that all he did was steal! Is there anything Microsoft did that was not stolen from somewhere else? Starting with the Basic interpreter that got Gates started. That was stolen from DEC. Isn't .NET and C# a copy of Java? It may or may not be theft in a legal sense, but morally it certainly is!
Microsoft's software development process is program-manager driven. That means even when they hire smart developers, they don't give the developers a free rein. Instead PMs decide what you will do. And where do PMs get ideas? By looking at competitors' products. That's why Microsoft is not an innovative company.
Uhm...no. The DEC computer they used when developing Altair BASIC was a PDP-10. DEC BASIC and Altair BASIC were both written in assembly language. The differences in architecture and memory constraints between a PDP-10 and an 8080 are too great for it to be feasible to steal code. At best you could use the PDP-10 code to learn some algorithms and then write your own versions for the 8080.
What people saying it was stolen from DEC are probably doing is getting confused over Gates and Allen's use of an 8080 emulator they had written earlier for PDP-10. When they decided to do an Altair BASIC they modified their 8080 emulator to be an Altair emulator and did all the testing and debugging of their 8080 BASIC on that since they did not have access to an actual Altair 8080.
That PDP-10 was owned by Harvard, and there was some question over whether or not using it for a commercial project like that was something students were allowed to do using their free accounts.
So if I take someone else's assembly code and port it to a new architecture then that's not a derivative work? Interesting stance!
>> That's why Microsoft is not an innovative company.
You may not like the company, but it is definitely an innovative company. They may not innovate on the things you are drawn to, but they definitely innovate. A lot too.
They certainly innovated world leading business strategies like "embrace, extend and extinguish".
As far as technical ideas and innovation are regarded, I have not seen a single instance of something they built which was not a copy or an extension of something which had been seen before.
If you have an idea that is so new, so unique, so different and unprecedented that no one else has ever had a similar idea or done something remotely similar, there's almost certainly something profoundly wrong with it.
> If you have an idea that is so new, so unique, so different and unprecedented...
Telephone, television etc. were pretty unique. Even the iPhone is so different from what came before it that it is truly innovative. Even people who know Apple is working on a phone, and expected something awesome, were blown away when the product was finally revealed. That's innovation.
Rockefeller was called a robber baron.
I think the Appalachians still have memories of those "great" men.
No, not at all like an iPhone.
If there was a line of PC's with Windows installed, like the iPhones, it wouldn't have been a problem.
Not long ago, it was literally impossible to buy a PC in regular stores, without it having Windows pre-installed.
https://www.justice.gov/atr/competitive-impact-statement-us-...
https://web.archive.org/web/20220302212243/https://medium.co...
You can vote for someone different, if you are unhappy with how the politicians in charge spend money.
You have no say whatsoever, in how billionaires and oligarchs choose to spend theirs.
Not sure how you could even come to any other conclusion?
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/bill-melinda-gates-founda...
Seems a lot of people liked that his wife encouraged him to spend all his ill-gotten gains on charitable causes. I generally prefer people not to steal and undermine society in the first place.