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.
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...
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.
If not, why is his personality worth a damn to the discussion?
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.
http://www.osnews.com/story/21887/Linus_Microsoft_Hatred_is_...
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics#Microsoft_law...
Isnt that considered evil around these parts?
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.
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-...
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.