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Bill Gates is a horrible person. (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 days ago by Maerman@lemmy.world to c/opensource@lemmy.ml

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So I just read Bill Gates' 1976 Open Letter To Hobbyists, in which he whines about not making more money from his software. You know, instead of being proud of making software that people wanted to use. And then the bastard went on and made proprietary licences for software the industry standard, holding back innovation and freedom for decades. What a douche canoe.

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[-] darkmogool@feddit.org 1 points 2 hours ago

yeah… no shit…

[-] Formfiller@lemmy.world 4 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

All billionaires are horrible humans and parasitic to all of humanity

[-] ronigami@lemmy.world 1 points 6 hours ago

He’s missing out on his redemption arc. But I doubt if put in his shoes that anyone would pass up the opportunity he had.

[-] Iambus@lemmy.world 7 points 11 hours ago

The most lemmy take ever

[-] Eyedust@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 13 hours ago

My PC repair teacher hated Gates. The first story he told us about him was about how he essentially obtained DOS for a literal pittance, turned a massive profit on it, and never credited the original creators.

I might've skewed the story over the years of trying to keep it in my memory, but if I did it just goes to show how much I hate Bill Gates.

[-] nagaram@startrek.website 6 points 12 hours ago

Nah you about got it.

[-] comradegodzilla@lemmy.ml 7 points 16 hours ago

Billionaire being a selfish person? Who woulda known? But yes, even though he donates a lot of his wealth, becoming a billionaire is a sign of being a sociopath.

[-] ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 16 hours ago

His donations are a tax dodge. Besides this billionaire philanthropy is a way to say that the people should not dictate how funds are allocated to things like medical and scientific research, international aid, etc. it’s saying that we instead are okay with our wealth being extracted to pseudokings and allowing them to make these decisions on our behalf. Should we research aids? Space? Should we give food aid to foreign nations experiencing famine? We don’t get to decide, let’s hope one of the oligarchs shines their light on these plights.

Meanwhile it buys great PR to rehab an image. Bill gates is “the nice billionaire” who sends people 10k of Microsoft shit he didn’t even pay for through reddit secret Santa (eg an ad buy). No one then cares that was instrumental in making computers full of proprietary bullshit, destroying interoperability, eliminating competition and killing open source efforts (look up embrace, extend, extinguish if you want to get angry about 90s and early 2000s Microsoft), or even that he probably raped kids on epsteins island

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[-] myfunnyaccountname@lemmy.zip 16 points 21 hours ago

What?! No. I bet next you are gonna tell me lil Donnie Trump is a pedophile.

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[-] pyre@lemmy.world 1 points 11 hours ago

yeah, but on the other hand, he fucked up the entire reduction system in the US.

[-] DupaCycki@lemmy.world 14 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

There have been many times when I thought to myself: "Hold on. Can I be absolutely sure that billionaires are scum? Maybe there's a crucial part of the story I'm missing?"

Every single time I just found even more cases of them blatantly lying, manipulating data and taking advantage of everything and everyone around them for personal gain. And every one of those times, it got me more depressed about the current and future state of society and the world in general.

You can try this yourself. I highly recommend it, even though the outcome is obvious. We can very rarely, if ever, be 100% sure about anything, so it's always a good idea to put your beliefs to the test. However, I find it fairly self-evident that anyone seriously arguing in favor of any billionaire has simply never critically examined this topic.

No matter where and how deeply you look, it's just evidence upon evidence upon evidence that they are, in fact, the worst filth that has ever shared the air with us. Though at least this one thing is comming to an end. Soon, we'll be breathing toxic waste while they'll be enjoying clean air in their doomsday bunkers larger than entire neighborhoods.

[-] dx1@lemmy.ml 1 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

There's some theoretical possibility that a billionaire could be a non-sociopath. If they literally dedicated their life to extracting money from the wider economy or top crust, not spending any of it on themselves or their descendants, but instead solely redistributing to the most needing people in the world. Monetary wealth at the end of the day is just economic control - it doesn't become evil until it's actually used for your own benefit, i.e., the economy is being rewired for you to live in luxury.

Assuming of course (big fat assumption) that you don't screw people over to get it in the first place - and, even if you are giving it all away, it's questionable why you'd end up with a surplus of money that large, if your goal is to donate it, why would the rate coming in exceed the rate going out, unless the goal was to purchase some institution or something, i.e., purchase Walmart and turn it into a cooperative. Probably not to invest the money to grow it to have more to give, because the return on investment for the money also has to come from somewhere, i.e., has its own ethical ramifications.

But I mean, name a single person in the last century who fit that profile. I can't name one. So.

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[-] fuzzywombat@lemmy.world 35 points 1 day ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

Obviously Bill Gates is a household name and in the tech community everyone knows who is Steve Ballmer. However not many people know who Paul Allen is even though he was one of the founder of Microsoft at the very start. In 1982 Paul Allen was diagnosed with cancer and Bill and Steve were worried that if Paul died the shares of the company would go to someone else along with control of the company. While Paul was literally getting cancer treatment, Bill and Steve were scheming to dilute the shares of the company to wrestle the control of the company away from Paul. Fortunately for Paul he survived the cancer. It really doesn't put Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer in very good light though. I remember reading about this from Robert X. Cringely's blog about two decades ago and I heard Paul Allen wrote about his version of this story in his memoir before his death.

Edit: I tried to find the original Robert X. Cringely's story from back in 2006 but looks like that link is broken but he did referenced it in 2011 when Paul Allen's book was released.

https://www.cringely.com/2011/03/30/i-told-you-so/