[kren]

Let's forget about the tens of thousands of companies that thrived and hundreds of thousands of jobs created for Bill Gates' horrible ways. And the fact that they willingly paid because they thought having Microsoft products was better than not having Microsoft products. No one benefited from his robber-baronry and everyone was forced to use Microsoft technology, even Apple, and those products brought no value to no one. Oh man, I can't even believe he would ever want to donate half of it to the prosperity of humanity either. What good does that do?

[nabla9]

You use incorrect reasoning.

You should think in the terms of opportunity cost.

I'm convinced that there would have been more jobs and innovation without MS monopoly. MS under gates killed and slowed down progress in personal computing. They didn't innovate.

[kren]

I actually don't think it was a monopoly. I think it created an opportunity for someone else to create better software. But instead we wanted to get rid of the so called monopoly and we secured Microsoft's position in the market. So if you want to talk about opportunity cost and state that Microsoft had a monopoly, then the opportunity cost is that we didn't let another better company take its place naturally and we spent a lot of tax payer money in politics to take care of a problem that didn't need intervention. I firmly believe we wouldn't be forced to use Microsoft today if we chose to do nothing.

[kren]

What I mean is, we secured it by forcing them to create better products, so we made Microsoft more desirable for consumers. If someone dislikes Microsoft's monopoly and Bill Gates' fortune, then I'd argue intervention made it worse.

[raverbashing]

Lest we don't forget about DRDOS, BeOS and other victims of his monopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code

[aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA]

“Any government action that would derail or delay Windows 98 would hurt the American economy and would cost American jobs.” — Bill Gates (5 May 1998)

[mikorym]

My opinion is that this is not something limited to software. Think about rain forests, and about how difficult it is to connect money with nature. Free Software will always have aspects like this.

It would be better to focus on individual actions that may have been nefarious, on Bill Gates's part, than the overall fact that everyone started to use MS Windows. I think this is the only way to have some sort of audit of opinions. It is not clear to me that humans are able to en masse adopt actions that are always mutually beneficial.

You could also say that humans have universally adopted a stance that gold is valuable. The question of whether gold should be valuable or not is rather difficult to answer, and indeed this is what cypherpunks were thinking about in 2007.

I have a somewhat unpopular opinion that leather is more nature friendly than synthetics---since many hides, globally, are often discarded due to the cost of tanning---and if I were to make leather products more popular, on average, then it may become difficult to say whether it should be popular or not. And at that point one would need some sort of critical appraisal of individual actions and the individual intention and results of actions.