Hacker News Reader

Comment by noonespecial | Hacker News Reader

"Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.”

    - Bill Gates

Every once in a while, I come across something new that surprises and impresses me about Bill Gates. If luck had fallen differently and Bill had become merely a millionaire, I think geeks would find him much, much cooler.

View on HN

When I had a chance to meet the guy, these were the things that struck me, in order:

He looks really old, way older than he does in photos. Must be all the stress.

He's very, very good at thinking on his feet.

He's actually quite pleasant to interact with and has milder views than you might think. People who know him have told me that the aggressive, brash behavior was merely a persona that he deliberately cultivated as part of his management style.

(Incidentally, I've also interacted with RMS; he immediately came across as as a jerk. I can't help feeling that this has something to do with his project not reaching the heights that many feel it should have.)

RMS should by all rights be pretty happy: GNU replaced Unix on servers, and has made more progress on the desktop than Unix ever did.

I guess he never predicted that something that wasn't Unix would be the dominant OS. In essence, he chose the wrong enemy.

Can you imagine what the world would be like if RMS had created 'GNU's Not DOS' instead?

You mean 'GND's Not DOS' :)

I sure do. In fact I'd written GND in my mind. But much like trying to write 'Linus' and not 'Linux', you have to really concentrate not to follow capital g, capital n, with capital u. :^)

I think a lot of people agree with that sentiment. But why should he be hated for his business acumen?

If he was dirt poor would he be much, much, much cooler?

No, he'd be the same cool, but it wouldn't be occluded by the gargantuan thing that Microsoft has become. Like the Woz, we'd be able to hear more about Bill the engineer than Bill the billionaire.

That's why my Debian is fast, Bill: source code is on the server.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com