07.29.08
Guest Post: Microsoft Fights Software Sharing Decades Ago
Guest post from an anonymous reader
Here’s an interesting comment. Same old, same old. Bill Gates tried to chew out a local computer club for sharing software. It’s probably the first of his ‘visionary’ statements. You get the full text in the link in the Slashdot post:
Here is the gem:
What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming,
finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute
for free?
If you dig a bit or have enough friends in the library, you can find it in print, too.
Kind of ironic since at the time it appears he was himself stealing computing resources from a small company. Back then CPU time cost by the fraction of a second:
PDP-10 time from a Seattle company (which went out
of business), one of the Universities in Seattle
(which kicked him and Paul Allen out when they found
out about it), and even Harvard University. Yes, the PDP-10
time used to run 8080 simulators. Used to write that initial
Basic interpreter … stolen. Odd how Bill Gates doesn’t
really like to tell the side of the story where he stole
PDP-10 time from a Seattle company (which went out of business),
one of the Universities in Seattle (which kicked him and Paul
Allen out when they found out about it), and even Harvard
University.”
Especially in the context of his 1976 letter to hobbyists above…
His disregard and even antipathy for the law as well as small companies goes back to the early 70’s as you can see. Few people have done as much economic damage during their lives as Gates causes annually. Right now his bad engineering has been costing double-digit billions of damage per year in just the US alone from just the malware, not including spam. Drop Microsoft and even the spam-generating botnets fade away.
He’s a politician since the late 1990’s but his business skills never amounted more to than those of a college drop out: poker bluffing and “Risk” style leveraging of monopolies. █
Highlight: Novell was the first to acknowledge that Microsoft FUD tactics had substance. Novell then used anti-Linux FUD to market itself. 
Highlight: Xandros let Microsoft make patent claims and brag about (paid-for) OOXML support. 
Highlight: Linspire's CEO not only fell into Microsoft arms, but he also assisted the company's attack on GNU/Linux. 
Highlight: Microsoft craves pseudo (proprietary) standards and gets its way using proxies and influence which it buys. 
Highlight: The invasion into the open source world is intended to leave Linux companies neglected, due to financial incentives from Microsoft. 
Analysis: Xen, an open source hypervisor, possibly fell victim to Microsoft's aggressive (and stealthy) acquisition-by-proxy strategy.
Apparent pathalogical disregared for the law said,
July 29, 2008 at 1:11 pm
Here is a mugshot from one of the times he was arrested for moving violations with a motor vehicle. Gates obviously thinks it’s funny:
http://www.gadgetizer.com/2006/11/14/bill-gates-arrested-for-speeding/
Wonder if it will come home to roost when Joe Sixpack figures out that “computer” downtime is caused by Bill’s ability to force bad engineering into the market. Or when that bad engineering enters health care and someone near and dear dies or is maimed as a result of Bill’s electronic legacy.