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by jacquesm 2470 days ago
Any mobster donating to the church or charity could claim to 'do good'. But it doesn't just matter what you do, it matters how you got there. Gates is where he is today - a position to lecture the world on how to behave - by a series of uncompetitive and monopolistic practices as well as a bunch of stuff that should have been downright illegal, and likely would have been if not for an 11th hour change in government.
2 comments
mrfredward 2470 days ago
The comparison of Gates to a mobster is unfair. We're comparing bundling a shitty internet browser with Windows to committing murder here.

Gates didn't take a life in building his fortune, but now he is saving lives. He is a net positive.

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jacquesm 2470 days ago
> We're comparing bundling a shitty internet browser with Windows to committing murder here.

It goes a lot further than that, and most mobsters never murdered anybody. It's just business, right?

Besides that, the comparison was made not to suggest that Gates murdered people but that a life full of wrongs can not be justified by charity at the end of it. And to this day Gates profits every day from a lot of their uncompetitive actions. See 'the Microsoft Tax', the way they are co-opting Linux nowadays to lure people to Azure, the way in which they tried hard - and to some extent succeeded - in tainting FOSS, specifically the kernel either directly or by proxy and so on.

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jimbob45 2470 days ago
It's tough to agree with you since the tech companies of today practice profoundly more uncompetitive and monopolistic practices than Microsoft ever did.
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jacquesm 2470 days ago
Just a couple:

- killing independent software providers in a very determined way

- Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

- The SCO Saga

- The Browser Wars

- Forcing manufacturers to bundle Windows with their computers

The list is long. Whether Google, Apple or Facebook are more uncompetitive and more monopolistic today has no bearing on what MS did when it did.

And yes, there is plenty wrong with Google, Apple and Facebook (and a bunch of others) but they are not the subject here. That's classic 'whataboutism'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

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