I agree with all of that, though maybe he actually
is a bit of a Robin Hood, considering Microsoft "plundered" mostly the first world? It may not have been his initial intention to give it away, but you're right, it's still a good act to do it. For kids it's more important to not die of a disease than to use Linux, that stuff can come later, and if I told a mother who is happy about her kid being alive that "yeah fine, but Linux is better, and Microsoft ads are dishonest, so how ethical is this?!", she'd slap me, rightfully so.
> In regards to 'credit', it's worth noting (forgive me if you already knew this) that I just learned not too long ago that Mother Teresa, often pedestooled as the archetype of things saintly, was not only not very Saintly, but depending on how you read it, quite the horrid cunt, whose good deeds were mostly a marketing ploy that she used to amass wealth.
Yes, I remember reading an article about that in like 1998, and being kinda shocked. Something about basements full of donations that went unused or to missionary work because she thought the poor were ordained to be poor by God or something, or purified by being poor, something like that.
But considering this, I wouldn't call her a horrid cunt: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Theresa#Spiritual_life It's not like she was freely enjoying her life as superstar, it rather seems to me she was a simple woman who genuinely believed in the value of faith even when she herself didn't have it, which seems kinda tough. That doesn't make some of her actions less misguided, but because I like crude analogies so much: if you're in the bathtub, and a kid wants to bring you some super fresh toast, so it just throws the toaster in the bathtub... that's a bad outcome, but born from good intentions. Similarly, if from her perspective all that matters for the ultimate outcome for a person is faith, and if poor people have a better chance to get to heaven, it kinda makes sense. Which is utterly off-topic but hey :)