This comment comes across as small minded and pessimistic without real evidence. Scientists and engineers typically help the world, with or without money. See Gates, Stallman, Page & Brin, Clair Cameron Patterson, etc
If you were trying to show altruistic examples of scientists and engineers, you fell very far astray.
1. Google had a previous FTC Commissioner in their pocket under Obama (named Joshua Wright). The same former FTC Commissioner is now part of Trump's transition team for the FTC. The FTC is charged with regulating companies like Google. The best source I can give you is The Intercept, which not only describes his quadruple-revolving-door, but links to the various stages of it. And yes, an investigation of Google by the FTC was quietly closed during his tenure.
https://theintercept.com/2016/11/15/google-gets-a-seat-on-th...
> "Joshua Wright has been put in charge of transition efforts at the influential Federal Trade Commission after pulling off the rare revolving-door quadruple-play, moving from Google-supported academic work to government – as an FTC commissioner – back to the Google gravy train and now back to the government."
2. In their original paper, Sergey Brin and Larry Page argued that advertising had a fundamentally corruptive influence on search. If you compare the quote from their paper below, which indicates a strong need for an uncorrupted academic search engine, with their multibillion dollar advertising empire, the only logical conclusion is that Sergey Brin and Larry Page value money and power over any sort of highminded desire to benefit society. You'll also notice that Google displays paid ads for websites that should naturally be the top result, like showing a paid Best Buy link above the official Best Buy website search result when searching for "best buy", just as they originally indicated was a trait of a "worse" search engine.
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
> "Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm."
Of course they do, the actual change has always been done by engineers and scientists, however, history only remembers the rulers and recently entrepreneurs
That is demonstrably false. Caesar brought lasting change around him, just like Napoleon did. Alexander the Great, though his empire crumbled after his death, brought Hellenic culture to many areas in the world. And I would like to know how the work of "scientists and engineers" triggered the Arab spring.
In any case, he was a billionaire several times over by then. The MS IPO was over 30 years ago.
Edit: Now that I re-read my comment, I come off as an arrogant prick. Sorry about that.
All I really meant to say was that setting up a foundation != charitable work. Any poor guy - like me for example - can setup a foundation, but it will only exist on paper.
But yes, I agree, this is not productive at all. My bad.
Oh you mean his tax deduction schemes?
"Before that, he was a cold and ruthless money making machine."
The world is going to suffer for decades under the proprietary NSA infected umbrella of his software. His ruthless machine lives on without him, he never turned it off.
Just wait and see, all this open sourcing from MS will increase and many will fall for the trap (embrace/extend), and then when the days of extenquish come around those of us who took the effort to transition to FOSS ecosystems will be far ahead of the game.
RMS is right. You either control the program or the program controls you.