This just floored me. I hope that some day I will acquire the generosity and perspective to use a small part of my assets for something like this.
Gates was heavily influenced by Feynman, and for good reason...
One of my favorite Feynman quotes: "The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion."
As we practice acquiring true compassion, the more difficult of the two to master, we can easily try for everyday laughter....life ought to be fun...
You can see this influence in Windows ME
For a moment i too thought the same, but it got spoiled soon. To view the videos you need to have sliver light and it takes a long time for just the page to download. Why cant it be just a downloadble file.
The claimed purpose of Gates' project was "to make the material freely available" for all learners as a gift (1). He didn't have to use DRM for that if he really bought the rights. As it was executed (Silverlight was never popular, only Netflix users had to install it) it appeared as just an advertising campaign for Silverlight.
Note that research.microsoft.com otherwise never had to follow the commercial limitations of the rest of Microsoft, regularly publishing PDFs (duh, research) or using other non-Microsoft technologies at the time they were "verboten" on other Microsoft sites.
Apparently, they "enhanced" the lectures with comments. These comments are also to be forever lost, remaining locked in in the limiting technology instead of being published in any common format like HTML or PDF.
1) Microsoft's news release from 2009:
https://news.microsoft.com/2009/07/14/microsoft-research-and...
"Microsoft Research, in collaboration with Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates, today launched a Web site that makes an acclaimed lecture series by the iconic physicist Richard Feynman freely available to the general public for the first time. The lectures, which Feynman originally delivered at Cornell University in 1964, have been hugely influential for many people, including Gates. Gates privately purchased the rights to the seven lectures in the series, called “The Character of Physical Law,” to make them widely available to the public for free with the hope that they will help get kids excited about physics and science."
Also don't forget that if posted to Youtube, they'd be unavailable in several countries where Youtube is blocked.
... Gift horses.
In the case of all of his gifts coming with strings, which would clearly include his charitable work - if he didn't attach strings to eg the $150+ billion he's going to give away, it'd be a disaster. The same is true for essentially all philanthropy. If you want to make sure charitable efforts are not wasted, strings are inherently necessary.
In this case, it would have enabled wider availability if it hadn't been stuck under silverlight, however you're free to reject the gift. At worst it's a very mild inconvenience in exchange for something that's very valuable, and people here are reacting wildly out of proportion to the issue.
Stop being a hater; start doing something useful for society.
http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/#data=2%7C%7C%...
Silverlight is needed to see the "free" videos of Feyman's lectures. That's how Gates did it.
Did Silverlight ever work on iOS or Android? Doesn't look so. The site was monopolistic even as it was made if it's only 5 (edit: 6) years old.
http://www.microsoft.com/getsilverlight/get-started/install/...
We can say what we want about copyright law, but at least copyright is based on the idea that the protected material will eventually become accessible in the public domain. DRM offers us no such bargain.
Can't take it too personally either way.
MS never made the Feynman Lectures free for all to read.
Try going to a public library and checking out books without a library card (which almost always cost money). Therefore under your premise public libraries are not for the common good because they have numerous use stipulations that go with them and they inherently restrict usage via fees.
If you're looking for ideas on where your money could make a difference, think about open source projects you use regularly, local food banks, EFF, Amnesty International, or check out the Awesome Foundation!
And if you need help rationalizing it to yourself, consider that you could make a concrete, tear-inducing (positive) difference in somebody's life for the cost of a dinner at a decent restaurant or an Xbox game.
The money was irrelevant, just as you think, but Bill spent his precious attention to give us Feynman instead of the nearly limitless other opportunities that money gave him. That rocks.
I didn't like his business practices. I very much like his philanthropy. One doesn't "cancel out" the other or any of that nonsense. They plot on different axis.
Do you have any source for that? That doesn't fit a lot of very famous billionaires, at least.
Not necessarily a randomly selected subset of billionaires.
And yet, I'd still like to see some kind of reason to think that that's how the other billionaires behave.