Glad I still hated him from when he tried to destroy the web, open source and various technical interoperability standards and free markets.
Seems a lot of people liked that his wife encouraged him to spend all his ill-gotten gains on charitable causes. I generally prefer people not to steal and undermine society in the first place.
Would you have preferred that he didn't spend his gains on charity?
EDIT: Also, did Bill Gates steal anything? Manipulation and monopolies are fundamentally wrong, but they do not amount to stealing. IF they do, then the Carnegies and Rockefellers were 'stealing' as well. Maybe, by your logic, we should take away all those libraries Carnegie built too?
Warren Buffet's son had something interesting to say about this.
> As more lives and communities are destroyed by the system that creates vast amounts of wealth for the few, the more heroic it sounds to “give back.” It’s what I would call “conscience laundering” — feeling better about accumulating more than any one person could possibly need to live on by sprinkling a little around as an act of charity. But this just keeps the existing structure of inequality in place. The rich sleep better at night, while others get just enough to keep the pot from boiling over. Nearly every time someone feels better by doing good, on the other side of the world (or street), someone else is further locked into a system that will not allow the true flourishing of his or her nature or the opportunity to live a joyful and fulfilled life.
It's sad that the world depends on the largess of a billionaire for basic disease eradication. That's really the job of governments and their public health departments, but yeah, there are worse things he could spend his money on (see Koch bros).
None of us know much or anything at all about the ethics of Gates, I think it's even unfair to smear his name with Epstein's unless there's actual evidence/allegations of something (Epstein did seek out tychoons, after all, perhaps he was slowly working up to enticing Gates into something compromising?).
Government intervention should always be a last resort, since it inherently involves coercion and violation of people's rights as opposed to voluntary action. We should be glad that people are willing to donate to charitable efforts that address critical problems such as disease.
Wow, what a question! Some would argue that all he did was steal! Is there anything Microsoft did that was not stolen from somewhere else? Starting with the Basic interpreter that got Gates started. That was stolen from DEC. Isn't .NET and C# a copy of Java? It may or may not be theft in a legal sense, but morally it certainly is!
Microsoft's software development process is program-manager driven. That means even when they hire smart developers, they don't give the developers a free rein. Instead PMs decide what you will do. And where do PMs get ideas? By looking at competitors' products. That's why Microsoft is not an innovative company.
> Starting with the Basic interpreter that got Gates started. That was stolen from DEC.
Uhm...no. The DEC computer they used when developing Altair BASIC was a PDP-10. DEC BASIC and Altair BASIC were both written in assembly language. The differences in architecture and memory constraints between a PDP-10 and an 8080 are too great for it to be feasible to steal code. At best you could use the PDP-10 code to learn some algorithms and then write your own versions for the 8080.
What people saying it was stolen from DEC are probably doing is getting confused over Gates and Allen's use of an 8080 emulator they had written earlier for PDP-10. When they decided to do an Altair BASIC they modified their 8080 emulator to be an Altair emulator and did all the testing and debugging of their 8080 BASIC on that since they did not have access to an actual Altair 8080.
That PDP-10 was owned by Harvard, and there was some question over whether or not using it for a commercial project like that was something students were allowed to do using their free accounts.
I am glad you recognize that technically what you have explained is not stealing.
>> That's why Microsoft is not an innovative company.
You may not like the company, but it is definitely an innovative company. They may not innovate on the things you are drawn to, but they definitely innovate. A lot too.
> You may not like the company, but it is definitely an innovative company. They may not innovate on the things you are drawn to, but they definitely innovate. A lot too.
They certainly innovated world leading business strategies like "embrace, extend and extinguish".
As far as technical ideas and innovation are regarded, I have not seen a single instance of something they built which was not a copy or an extension of something which had been seen before.
Sounds like Apple too. Steve Jobs was a master at copying technologies but evolving them into arguably better mousetraps. Electric cars have been around for over 100 years But Elon musk evolved them and brought them to the masses. These examples abound.
This is how innovation works. New ideas build off previous ideas. Companies launch products after seeing what else is in the market. The legal system determines when this is an allowed and when it isn't, that's why that legal system exists.
If you have an idea that is so new, so unique, so different and unprecedented that no one else has ever had a similar idea or done something remotely similar, there's almost certainly something profoundly wrong with it.
The legal system is imperfect, and that leaves plenty of opportunity for unscrupulous people to take advantage of other people's work. In popular opinion that may get called theft, even if it is not illegal.
> If you have an idea that is so new, so unique, so different and unprecedented...
Telephone, television etc. were pretty unique. Even the iPhone is so different from what came before it that it is truly innovative. Even people who know Apple is working on a phone, and expected something awesome, were blown away when the product was finally revealed. That's innovation.
It's impossible to quantify by how much but the widespread adoption of open source seen in the 2000s might've come sooner if Gates wasn't actively trying to hobble it. Where the world might be today is something which bothers me.
Or to have prevented him doing all those anti-competitive practices that led to all that money. Remember when you couldn't buy a PC without also buying windows, even if you wanted to use a different OS. F Bill Gates.
I think she was complacent or at least had no opinion of it until the case blew up. Did she ever tell him not to hang out with Epstein anymore and he refused? It's an easy narrative for her to give now, but I don't buy it.
I am disappointed in Bill. I am actually a beneficiary of their scholarship, for college. At the same time, I think this is Melinda playing the blame game.
> Did she ever tell him not to hang out with Epstein anymore and he refused?
Apparently yes. Numerous media reports have said that he had promised not to engage with Epstein any more, and that the event that suddenly precipitated the divorce was a revelation in the New York Times that Bill had been breaking that promise.
There’s no need to speculate that Melinda had special knowledge. Epstein was convicted of procuring a child for prostitution in 2008 and was subsequently a registered sex offender. Bill admits to attending dinners with Epstein until 2011.
By the time under discussion Epstein had been convicted in a US court for a crime involving sex with an underage girl, and was a widely famous and notorious media figure.
What she didn't said explicitly is that "kiddie porn". She must have known something horrendous from her own investigations. For the sake of her children she didn't blow the issue past "being with Epstein". But eveyone I know hinted that "younger taste".
The first thing that Melinda did was to Remove the money from the foundations in order to put that directly into her (and then her children) pockets.
That's the actual objective of the whole story: she wants the money, for herself, and her children. But Bill Gates had already pledged that money to charity. So she had to find a good excuse to get the money out. This is it.
Of course, once you divorce and become the richest woman on Earth, just from being married to the right guy, it's bound to attract scrutiny, so let's find a good escape and scapegoat. And in these days and age, what's better than blaming a rich white male, favorite scape goat of our times with zero redeeming chances on the horizon, not even after pledging his entire fortune to charity !
So here we are : Bill "had an affair", 20 years ago. Yeah. But somehow, this is now that it's horrible to recall. Maybe the period coincides with the monopoly trial. Likely a tense situation. But who cares.
Bill "knew Jeffrey Epstein". Sure, these days, it's an absolute sure blow. Well, Epstein also knew essentially everybody with money and power in US, but hey, no, let's phrase that as if it was a personal and deep connection, like, probably he was providing some under-aged "services" to her husband. Sure, she never said that. Just implied. Deniably.
And while the word is occupied blaming a rich white male, the world does not get to see that charity organizations now have 50 B$ less to use over the next few decades, so that a poor, poor, horribly traumatized but now Extremely Rich white woman can scam away with the money and transmit it tax free to her children through multiple offshore expert schemes.
But hey, that's not the story ! Too booooring !
Look, look ! Epstein here !
How did you go from reading a story about one of the richest men kindling a connection with a prolific child trafficker to twisting this into a reactionary incel narrative about the “oppression of the white man” and the “injustice of divorce court” for the poor billionaire with the best lawyers?
It feels like the "Digg exodus" that affected Reddit about ten years ago: now that Reddit has become a site for endless consumption of memes, former Reddit users may be coming here.
This isn't just reported by CBS news. Bill Gates lied about his relationship with Epstein multiple times. Would it really surprise anyone that the billionaire philanthropist under heat for conducting illegal medical trials on vulnerable groups in India and other countries was involved in other nefarious and grotesque activities involving children?
What axe does she have to grind exactly? She has distanced herself from Bill due to his relationship with Epstein. It is known, and there are pictures and documents verifying this and of Gates flying on Epstein's Lolita Express. Gates continued his relationship with Epstein after he was convicted, and also lied about his relationship with him. This is like Prince Andrew trying to say he didn't sweat at the time.
So now we should assume she is vindictive and making up stuff to get back at him? That is ridiculous. The information about his relationship with Epstein was already known.
No. We should simply - like everything else - never lose sight of the source AND the context.
She doesn't get a free pass on Common (News) Sense 101 simply because her axe satisfies some bias one might have towards Bill.
If the info about his relationship is already known then...why is this on HN? So haters can hate?? There are plenty of other forums for such things. This isn't one of them.
Stop buying into a news cycle that's based on revenue and the health of the corporate media's bottomline, and not on what's actually relevant, important, etc.
And again...source and context matters.
We won't get what we need and deserve if we keep accepting an LCD mindset.
P.s. This has nothing to do with his association with MS. It's TMZ lite.
Hopefully this post won’t get flagged, as it happened to the ones that had been posted when first clear evidence about the Gates’s connection with Epstein had showed up.
The post about MS forcing Minecraft users to create MS accounts was flagged super fast and pushed on second page, even if there were many upvotes. I think we have to accept this HN weackness, fanboys and PR teams will push things on or off the first page .
Honestly, the way the media willfully ignores this Gates-Epstein stuff and the way anything critical of Gates is auto-flagged makes me really hate his pedo guts even more. I mean even Google autocomplete won't show anything for "bill gates epstein". How many people has this guy paid off!?
Effectively...this is suspect evivence in the sense that the context matters. Context always matters.
That is, ex-wife, that he cheated on, interviewed by CBS "news". And eventually she'll be pushing a book. She has an axe to grind and knows exactly how to hurt him.
He probably deserves it. But that doesn't mean we take her as a "reliable witness."
Hopefully neither Kanye nor Mrs. Kardashian were/are pedophiles. Epstein was a pedophile, Gates was in cahoots with him, Gates has founded and, afaik, is still one of biggest shareholders of one of the biggest tech companies on Earth, this counts. It's about our profession and about us helping us keeping it clean. Having owners in cahoots with certified pedos doesn't help at making the industry remain clean. Again, us being led (and paid) by people who are close contacts with certified pedos is not ok.
This doesn't matter anymore because the post has been flagged, as I had suspected.
Literally not even comparable. One is about a child sex trafficker who has had deep connections with the state, academia, the sciences and technology. This isn’t petty pop culture drama. It is shameless just how uncaring some people are about the most serious topics.
Off topic: Is there somewhere that explains why this article was flagged?
In the few minutes it took me to scan down the front page to the time I clicked on this story the link was flagged. I'm interested to know which specific guidelines were violated.
Flags come from users submitting them (after a certain level of karma you can flag posts). There won’t be a canonical “why” since it’s essentially whatever the community considers flag-worthy.
You can flag for any reason. If you don’t want to have this topic even be discussed - you can flag it. I think that’s a common reason why people do it. It’s about the only kind of “downvote” you get as far as stories go.
It makes me chuckle how a creep like Bill, among all the disgusting behaviour still relatively enjoy taint free image. Media has largely been silent and instead many mainstream media had elevated him into a covid expert. Such a sad state of affairs where billionaires can basically buy their image with the help of media, the same media that is supposed to keep in check.
Rockefeller Center and Carnegie Hall are more well known than the robber barons they are named after. The Goldwater Scholarship is prestigious, yet is named after an architect of the Southern Strategy.
Spend enough money, and a wealthy person can buy back their public image. I wonder if they think money can also buy back their souls.
Such a sad state of affairs where billionaires can basically buy their image with the help of media, the same media that is supposed to keep in check.
So, pretty much no change in the way things work. While they might not have been billionaires in the past, they were rich. Heck, you don't even need to be a billionaire today. Simply rich enough will do.
And it isn't like "The media" has a long history of truthfullness: This has really been a development of the last century. Papers in the 1800s printed falsehoods for sales. The "Spanish Flu" being call 'spanish' is really a result of wartime censorship. War often brings censorship itself. Right now, a lot of media is owned by a few companies. The bright side is that it is easier for everyday citizens to report on things around them (thanks, internet) but everyday folks don't have access to folks like Gates.
I'm not sure where you got that he was a covid expert, though. The main reason the media would interview him is because of his foundation's past 'experience' with communicable disease. Doesn't make him an expert, just possibly a smarter ask than, say, asking me about it.
I'm surprised you're getting downvoted, especially on HN. Bill Gates built one of the most anti competitive software businesses in the world, a lot of the profit was made from government contracts. He consciously destroyed competitors or made it impossible for them to operate.
I actually believe steve jobs when he says microsoft held back computer development by decades potentially.
Yet now he is some sort of god/genius for the elite. It's very nice that he's eliminating disease and helping with vaccines, but I just can't believe how much everyone's forgotten about his past.
And then there's the whole Epstein thing on top of that. I mean come on...
The first chance Steve Jobs had to do so, he wrested control of computer software from the users and developers, and forced his company in as a middle-man taking a 30% cut from all software sold on their platform. Nice.
I think Apple coming out on top would have been worse for computer software and development.
While I’m not disagreeing with you it’s worth point out there have been middle men in the software industry since it started, publishers and retailers have always taken their cut. Sometime totalling far more than 30%. Apple see themselves as a retailer of software, bricks and mortar retailers take a 30-50% cut of sales. Apple (and Jobs) clearly modelled the App Store on that.
That’s not to so say it’s right, the internet is meant to democratise society and remove these middle men. Apples cut should be significantly lower.
> The first chance Steve Jobs had to do so, he wrested control of computer software
Are you kidding? He didn't wrestle anything. People chose to buy the iphone, and developers chose to develop for it. You can develop only for android if you want. Good luck developing for only linux in 1990.
As aggressive as Jobs could be, he did not force anything anywhere. The iphone is about as close you can come to a voluntarily purchased high end purchase as you get. It's a free choice. And it's a free choice to develop for iphone.
He made conscious decisions across decades to disempower the aspects of hardware and software he didn't like, from trying to have the Apple II have two expansion slots for the bare essentials, for throwing the swing of the axe that killed Flash. Consumers still chose to buy it, developers still chose to develop for consumers, but part of the role of developers is to be informed voices when the consumer won't and to communicate complex issues accessibly (consumers didn't _know_ why they want more than two slots, but they used them when they had them!). Jobs had a powerful voice and chose when to use it to meet his own ends at the cost of the wider ecosystem.
Eliminating computing freedom on the machines people paid money for is not forcing? Where is my choice to have the high end iPhone hardware with my software running on it?
>You can develop only for android if you want. Good luck developing for only linux in 1990.
Don't pretend you are a retard, if you are a government or business that provides a website or mobile app you HAVE no REAL choice then to also target iOS.
If the local factory poisons the air you should move if you don't like it right?
IF society(probably in EU and Asia) decides that Apple damages the "environment" they will be free to force Apple to do better or Apple will be free to exit.
Had their positions been reversed, Steve Jobs would have been doing the exact same thing in the software industry.
You can look at Apple's behavior in spaces where they dominate to see that. Or are we expecting that they will open the floodgates tomorrow and allow additional app stores on the iPhone? And the only reason they haven't locked down their desktop operating system as tightly as their mobile operating system is users have expectations of how open a desktop should be to running what software they choose... Expectations largely established by the Microsoft ecosystem and the alternative it would offer if Apple tried to seal things up.
For some reason, when Apple does it, people think it's pro-consumer, and when Microsoft does it, it's anti-competitive. The legendary reality distortion field effect of Apple's CEO seems to have outlived him.
Their positions weren't reversed, and you don't know, and Jobs always hated the way Bill did business so you don't know that.
For a start, apple builds products that every single consumer made a choice to buy. And over 50% of them still choose android.
Bill gates went above almost all consumer's heads and sold windows to governments and big corporations, and then bundled their own software with it. It's part of the reason why the UX of windows was always so bad, because the end user wasn't making purchase decisions.
So no, I don't agree. Jobs hasn't been leading Apple for a long time. You don't know what he would have done, other than that he likes closed garden products. That's a long way from the anticompetitive behaviour that microsoft did over the years.
And again, window was like 95% of the market at it's peak. Apple is nowhere near that.
Ironically, among the reasons Microsoft did so well in the government and large corporate spaces is that Microsoft made the software, not the hardware. Corporations didn't trust that you could only run Apple's software on Apple hardware. They could see the vendor lock in and they didn't want to take the risk of giving Apple the entire homestead.
The story of Apple versus Microsoft has always been a story of a vertical monopoly pointing to a horizontal monopoly and saying how evil they are.
>I actually believe steve jobs when he says microsoft held back computer development by decades potentially.
This doesn't seem plausible to me. Decades is a lot even when accounting for compounding growth and some of their more questionable practices. They've also surely fueled a lot of resources into development, and I'm not sure if a different company would have definitely acquired as much money to be able to use in the first place. I also don't really see Apple as a beacon of light in comparison.
But then again, I also think that modern Gates is a huge force for good in the world, and a good role model for other rich people. As for Melinda, she also seems great but from what I'm seeing she focuses on less effective causes and I suspect her money will overall help the world a bit less (which is her right of course) than if they were in his hands.
Probably because as much as I dislike Bill Gates, and the Gates Foundation, Melinda Gates massively benefit(ed)|(s) from all the bullshit and fanfare and I'd like to see some evidence in general before I condemn people.
Talk to the nurses under her, and you learn that Mother Theresa was also an asshole.
I'm sure that Hitler had a redeeming quality or two.
Nobody is purely evil or purely good, although Hitler can gain the "almost purely evil" tag.
Where Gates stands on that spectrum, I have no idea. He's done vast amounts of good and he's done vast amounts of evil. Balancing them depends on how you weight each action, and that's a very personal opinion.
Before PayPal Elon coded his first product zip2 however spagetti code it might be. He made his fortune with his own talent unlike Steve. If Woz had not met Steve, no way apple would have formed. Try stopping Elon
> Yet now he is some sort of god/genius for the elite. It's very nice that he's eliminating disease and helping with vaccines, but I just can't believe how much everyone's forgotten about his past.
It is definitely not by accident. I'm sure someone was payed very handsomely to fix his reputation.
My theory is lot of tech people knew Epstein due to his interest in transhumanism and cryonics. Melinda is pretty pissed on Bill due to his affair and using this to taint his image. I am not saying Bill is good guy, there is simply no evidence but there the accuser has motivation to taint Bill's image.
There is extensive evidence that Bill Gates had a close relationship with a serial criminal pedophile, sex trafficker, and rapist. It’s all pretty out in public at this point.
How would your wife feel if that statement could be made about you?
> There is extensive evidence that Bill Gates had a close relationship with a serial criminal pedophile, sex trafficker, and rapist. It’s all pretty out in public at this point.
Citation Please
> How would your wife feel if that statement could be made about you?
Seems a lot of people liked that his wife encouraged him to spend all his ill-gotten gains on charitable causes. I generally prefer people not to steal and undermine society in the first place.