One of the last messages sent from the doomed Titan submersible during its June 2023 voyage to the Titanic wreckage was "all good here," the Coast Guard said.
          • hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            5·
            2 months ago

            Pasted the text here so no need to visit r*ddit.

            The text covered well for the software related history of Gates, but let’s also not forget the not-so-far past. Dealings with Epstein (which led to divorce with Melinda, sus?) and helping monopolize COVID vaccines come to mind first

            
Bill Gates *has*, in fact, earned himself the "evil CEO" stereotype in the past. [Microsoft was a notorious monopoly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft) throughout the 1990s. It was even convicted of anti-trust violation in both the US and EU; both times it paid the fine and went on being a monopoly anyway. Their OEM agreements with hardware vendors actually made it difficult to impossible to get any other operating system onto a PC.

When we talk about "altruism and sustainability" applied to software, most of us should be thinking about Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Starting all the way back in the 1970s with his "[open letter to hobbyists](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists)," Gates carried out a decades-long vendetta against all open source software anywhere. This went beyond all common business sense into "now you're just being a dick" territory. See also the pack of frivolous lawsuits Microsoft pressed against the FOSS community and Steve Ballmer referring to FOSS as a "cancer."

Generally, Bill Gates was to nerds what Joe McCarthy was to Socialists for a few decades. So he burned some very heavy bridges, even among his peers in the tech community. And BTW, Gates was born wealthy and managed to muscle Microsoft Windows onto IBM merely through family connections.

NOW, in the present day, Gates has separated himself from all that and become a legendary altruist, especially contributing to fight diseases through the Gates' Foundation. Some might even say he redeemed himself. Microsoft itself buried the open source hatchet finally; partly because the desktop market is now sinking out from under them while Google has taken its place as the monopoly heavyweight.

Anyway, the above is an attempt to provide some context, nothing more. I know that a portion of the public will always say "billionaire = bad!" no matter what. But it's not like you can say Gates did nothing wrong.