Comment by bmelton | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bmelton | Hacker News Reader

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Hate the man's business practices. Love the man for his philanthropical work. They don't need to cancel out, and you don't need to forgive one to appreciate the other.

Michael Vick was put in prison for dog fighting. I absolutely hate him for that. At the same time, I appreciate his talent on the field as a football player.

Orson Scott Card is a rampant homophobe. I absolutely hate him for that. Doesn't affect my opinion of his novels though, not in the least.

There's no logic in idolizing or demonizing anyone. Life's a lot better when you get out of casting a pall over everything a person does by some other things that they've done. People like making villains and heroes of people, whether or not they deserve it.

We see someone we don't like from afar, and it's easy to assume that they're bad at everything, that they're horrible people, that they're bad parents, that they're likely running around kicking puppies all day long. That's very rarely the truth.

With people we're nearer too, it's easier to accept that they have strengths and weaknesses, and I don't know why it's hard to imagine the same thing of famous people, but it is. There's very little to love about Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft. Similarly, there's very little to hate about Bill Gates of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Roll with it.

It's still a bit like taking with one hand and giving with the other, if you know what I mean? Where the money comes from does matter. So it's not quite as disconnected as the examples you cited, IHMO. Kinda like drug barons who help kids and poor people in their communities; sure it's great for those they help, but it doesn't make you forget the dead bodies they are also responsible for. Not just the companies ripped to pieces, consider all the FUD about open source - haven't heard that stuff in a while, huh? But imagine if that would actually have taken root; and it wasn't for lack of trying, that's for sure. Did Microsoft cost the world more than it gives back? How would the world look if what they wanted, they would have gotten? Hard to tell.

I do think Gates is aging well, and getting cooler as he does; but it would help if he at least could say "in hindsight, some Microsoft tactics and claims were kinda low, oh well", instead of going on about how everything is so wonderful and smart and clean, and the past full of hard work and friendly ribbing and nothing else. But to be fair, that seems to be the norm of the industry, and he seems to be less full of it than most. So yeah, good for him, but still let's not confuse him with people who spend all their life doing good, or saints. If I give someone 5$, my generosity is not measured by how poor that person is, but by how much 5$ are for me. That sometimes gets forgotten in all the money porn.

I don't necessarily disagree. The broader point that I was trying to make was that idols shouldn't be idolized, nor should demons be demonized. People may or may not be the sum of their actions, but even if you just mugged somebody an hour ago, you giving that $5 to a poor person is still an act of good. Not quite as benevolent, but still, preferable to having spent that $5 on crack cocaine.

Robin Hood he isn't (though I'd argue that people's view of Robin Hood is also very skewed -- he did not steal from the rich and give to the poor, as the nutshell synopsis goes), but nor is he Satan. In real life, we're very few of us saints. 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.

All totaled though, yes, it'd be fantastic if Bill Gates came out and decried the actions of his 'former self'. But that doesn't mean that his current contributions don't massively benefit society.

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 :)

Perhaps I've absorbed the bias from whichever exposé I read on the matter, but (paraphrased), she ran medical centers more like "places for poor people to go and die", and ran them zero painkillers, inadequate, unhygienic conditions that were understaffed, all so that she wouldn't 'interfere' with their suffering, which she felt likened them to Christ. As I stated, it's very likely that the truth is somewhere in the middle, and I certainly don't have any knowledge that would consider me insightful on the matter.

> Hate the man's business practices. Love the man for his philanthropical work

At the core of this is trust. Bill lost mine at Microsoft's helm - he has shown a borderline sociopath that will stop at nothing and will destroy anyone on his path.

To give this much credit to someone with such dark history is appallingly naive.

To give him trust might be naive, but giving him credit for the things he has done is just a recognition of fact.

He donated $28,000,000,000 to a philanthropic organization. Refusal to "give him credit" for that is just being petty. He did it.

Conversely, he engaged in anti-competitive behavior with Netscape, so he gets the credit for that too.

Loving him for the former is every bit as pragmatic as hating him for the latter, but neither act means that is who he is as a person. People are far too complex for that.

Everytime a big company implements a feature or rolls out something, they affect companies working in that area. You can find similar things about almost any company or person, but for some reason the bad things about Microsoft are always amplified.

For example, see how Google squashed Skyhook

http://www.theverge.com/2011/05/12/google-android-skyhook-la...

Aliyun and Acer prevented from launching a phone because of the secret rules of the "Open" Handset Alliance. http://www.zdnet.com/cn/report-google-stops-acer-from-launch...

Apple and the famed 30% cut of even sales from Apps, an example of how they used someone's OSS code in Safari and then banned them from the app store:

http://blog.readability.com/2011/02/an-open-letter-to-apple/

My point is that someone fed a steady diet of bad stories about one company while barely being exposed to good stories ends up not liking them and everyone knows how many tech sites and journalists and news sites like Slashdot and HN's bias in story selection because of the vocal minority who sometimes appear to be on a crusade of ends justifying the means.

It seems you need a history lesson:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics#Microsoft_law...

I already knew about that, but not sure what you're implying here.

The link says this:

>in 1994, a California jury ruled the infringement by Microsoft was not willful, but awarded Stac $120 million in compensatory damages, coming to about $5.50 per copy of MS-DOS 6.0 that had been sold. The jury also agreed with a Microsoft counterclaim that Stac had misappropriated the Microsoft trade secret of a pre-loading feature that was included in Stacker 3.1, and simultaneously awarded Microsoft $13.6 million on the counterclaim. [2]

Are you alleging that Microsoft bought the judge and/or jury off? Why would they award such a high amount then? They ruled that the infringement wasn't intentional, and certainly they had way more access to the facts and testimony of the case than you or me.

I have to ask, did you even read your own history lesson before teaching it to others?

Also, it's funny that no company can even sell the equivalent of DriveSpace these days for Chromebooks, iPads and iPhones. Android phones would probably need the user to get root and/or unlock the bootloader which is a nonstarter for already niche software. Would even be banned from the Mac App Store. Yet people buy them and cheer them on just because they're more anti-MS while pretending to be pro software freedom.

A couple of contemporary history lessons for you.

Google found guilty of infringing Lycos patents. http://www.fastcompany.com/1844439/meet-vringo-cto-ken-lang-...

Similar Apple lawsuit http://www.zdnet.com/virnetx-wins-apple-patent-infringement-...

So, you think Microsoft developed DoubleSpace by itself, without knowledge of Stac's technology? I'm not sure exactly how they got away with unwilling patent infringement after that. Maybe they formed a new team and never let them read Stac's patents, or something like that. Still, they got US%5.5 for every copy of DOS 6 sold, which is, IMHO, the judge saying that, while there is not enough evidence to rule the infringement was deliberate, Microsoft didn't play nice.

Then you throw a smokescreen by mentioning Apple and Google. We are not discussing Apple and Google, we are discussing Bill Gates and his past as a sub-criminal bully and how he is trying to erase that image by high-profile charity.

As for disk and file compression, you can't sell something like it for Windows Phones either. Or Windows - because NTFS already supports file compression. You can do it for Linux, on servers and desktops, but that's another question. I'm not sure if there is stable support for file compression on any current filesystem. Probably yes, but storage is cheap these days.

Also, i4i: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I4i

>In May 2007 Vulpe and i4i successfully sued Microsoft, in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas

Isnt that considered evil around these parts?

That is the majority opinion around here, yes, but I contend that that opinion is flawed, precisely because of cases like i4i. It is a textbook case of a big guy ripping off a small guy, and patents being the only thing that helped the small guy.

The Wikipedia entry has surprisingly little backstory, so it turned out to be a poor choice on my part. But the gist is that like the Stac case, Microsoft was in active discussions to license or buy i4i's Office plugin before they turned around and, without warning, built it themselves into the next release of Word. Unlike the Stac, and indeed most, patent lawsuits, Microsoft was found guilty of willfull infringement.

I'm mostly a fan of Microsoft, and I don't really believe all the hate it gets is justified, but this is one case where it was really a bad actor.

So what? If he is a sociopath, so what? Are you trying to insinuate he has dark ulterior motives for his charity efforts?

If not, why is his personality worth a damn to the discussion?

> Are you trying to insinuate he has dark ulterior motives for his charity efforts?

Dark ulterior motives? No. Being remembered as a philanthropist rather than a robber-baron is quite enough. Hs is doing good, but he is not doing good for the good of others.

Why the f%ck do you care if he is doing it to be remembered? Since when was the value of charitable works derived from the motive?

As usual, Linus shoots straight.

http://www.osnews.com/story/21887/Linus_Microsoft_Hatred_is_...

The discussion started by matthewmacleod is about the moral character of Bill Gates, not the value of his charitable works. For most people, intentions are important when discussing the former.

Calling him a sociopath is absurd. A sociopath wouldn't care about charity in the slightest. If you think he was doing it for publicity purposes, he wouldn't be putting so much effort into it or avoiding the media at times like was mentioned in the article. You don't have to agree with what he did, but he has certainly shown he is not a bad person and has good intentions.

'Dark history'? Aggressive business practices for sure, but it's not like he was dumping toxic chemicals in the water supply or something. How many people were killed as a result of Gates 'sociopathy'? I'm afraid that slowing the popularity of Linux and the open web doesn't strike me as particularly impressive in the Evil Genius stakes.

Jimmy Saville, well-known British celebrity with lots of charity work for kids, now known to be a sick child abuser.

Lance Armstrong, well-known cyclist with lots of charity work fighting cancer, now known to be a drug cheat.

Can Bill Gates wash away his sins? Has he really turned over a new leaf?

"The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's investments in Monsanto and Cargill have come under heavy criticism. Is it time for the foundation to come clean on its visions for agriculture in developing countries?"

http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matter...

/facepalm at how many logical fallacies you have squeezed into one short comment.

>Lance Armstrong, well-known cyclist with lots of charity work fighting cancer, now known to be a drug cheat.

Are you really equating Lance Armstrong with a guy who likely sexually abused hundreds of children? That's idiotic.

You realize that what Armstrong did wasn't a crime, right? Just against some arbitrary rules of some form of sports entertainment (a bicycle race!)? And that the treatments he undertook are perfectly legal in the real world? And that they may have even helped his recovery from cancer, in one way or another?

You hate charity. We get it. But I'll take the work of Bill Gates and Lance Armstrong over whatever it is the armchair pundits around the internet are doing, all day.

< Orson Scott Card is a rampant homophobe. I absolutely hate him for that. Doesn't affect my opinion of his novels though, not in the least.

I respect you for that. In addition, I don't personally blame him for his views, but strongly disagree with them. But my love of his books doesn't interfere with my disagreement with his sexual identity views. I feel that if in the '90s the prevailing wasn't the same, that OSC, wouldn't voice the same opinions so cavalierly.

I can disagree with someone's politics without disagreeing with their literary ideas, and I don't have any qualms about that. OSC is a fantastic author, with terrible personal opinions and I accept that unconditionally.

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