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Comment by haneefmubarak | Hacker News Reader

We are the people who end up having to deal with a lack of free choices, a small range of products which are buggy, and DRM bullshit.

As for his foundation and whatnot, it could be said that a fairly large number of people, given the sort of financial resources he has, would help "millions of people". Actually, a lot of extremely wealthy people do use their financial resources to help vast numbers of people. Often, they just make donations instead of creating foundations, since other foundations may already exist to do what they want.

As such, it is quite reasonable to disregard the "millions of people his foundation and charity work have touched", as many others would have done the same in his place.

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What DRM bullshit? I thought it was Apple that implemented Palladium?

>As such, it is quite reasonable to disregard the "millions of people his foundation and charity work have touched", as many others would have done the same in his place.

Steve Jobs quote:

>Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology

Also, throwing money at charities is far less effective than try to affect change by working full time on it. If money was the solution, the tens of billions given to Africa would've solved the issues.

If you are unfamiliar with Microsoft's role as a major proponent of DRM and generally consumer-hostile device policies, you just haven't been paying attention.

Allowing Vista to play Bluray makes MS a major proponent of DRM? Then so are Google(Widevine acquisition), Mozilla(DRM in HTML5) and Apple. If you're referring to the FUD against Vista DRM, it was debunked long ago. I guess you missed it(read all three parts).

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/everything-youve-read-about-v...

Also, perhaps you believe more FUD against Windows 7's perceived DRM, but it was also debunked.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2009/02/oh-the... Perhaps you need to read from more varied news sources than just Slashdot, Groklaw and Boycott Novell/Techrights.

And what have you got to say about Palladium implementation by Apple?

> We are the people who end up having to deal with a lack of free choices, a small range of products which are buggy, and DRM bullshit.

What are you dealing with? Get real, you are sitting on HN waiting for your Uber.

Buggy products? Who has bug free products? Name one bug free product from 10 years ago. Is it going to be some half ass Linux desktop distro? The new bi-weekly 'Windows Killer'?

Lack of free choices 10 years ago was completely normal. Using free alternatives in 2000 as a desktop was laughable at best. Even now, in a golden age of OSS where you have tons of cool tools and cheap processing power. Mature projects have issues with finding quality contributors. I'm not talking about a random jQuery plug-in, etc.

Market spoke and it's 100% clear. I was around when there was a 'movement' of getting Linux distros to every office. That was a decade ago and the only viable competitor that made it into the space was Apple. They borrowed some of their base from *BSD. Which is mostly a server workhorse. Ironic.

Why are you bringing up DRM? What does it have to do with Microsoft? Learn about business schematics and history of it.

> As for his foundation and whatnot, it could be said that a fairly large number of people, given the sort of financial resources he has, would help "millions of people".

It's not about raw $ it's about % of wealth and focus. Handing off money to a foundation for a write off is not 'charity work'.

TLDR: You have no idea how different the technology space was 10 years ago. I can say this with extreme confidence.

> Using free alternatives in 2000 as a desktop was laughable at best

I used a combo of Linux & FreeBSD as my desktop OS exclusively from ~2000 to 2005 (when I bought my first mac). For the 4 years prior to that range I only ever booted into Windows to play games.

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