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.

The most lemmy take ever

All billionaires are horrible humans and parasitic to all of humanity

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.

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

yeah… no shit…

AstraZenica COVID vaccine was going to be opensource but he used with weight as a donor to pressure the university to sell it to a firm he had ownership instead

He's also a thief of course, as that's the only way to become a billionaire.

Well yes.

Being a Billionaire should be criminalized

Watch the TV movie from the late 90s "Pirates of Silicon Valley" which pretty much paints both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as really shitty people. I mean just look at what Gates did with the Altair. Said he had an operating system, didn't have an operating system, and what have you.

Then there's the whole Xerox Park thing where neither Apple nor Microsoft would be where they're at today without the engineers at Xerox who were pretty much forced to hand over their stuff because Xerox execs didn't see value in a GUI and Mouse. Gates and Jobs both were more than happy to go in there and pillage what was developed in order to create Windows and The Macintosh/MacOS

We all know that every billionaire is a horrible person. They can't be anything else.

There is a viable alternative to the problems raised by Bill Gates in his irate letter to computer hobbyists concerning "ripping off" software. When software is free, or so inexpensive that it's easier to pay for it than to duplicate it, then it won't be "stolen".

—Jim Warren, July 1976

He’s still the same sociopath as always, except now with a savior complex. Giving away all his money, is he? His foundation has been around 25 years and he still has $100b+ net worth. A single individual shouldn’t have that much power, and the fact that he still voluntarily wields it while virtue signaling affirms every negative opinion of him. Even if he were the benevolent billionaire his PR campaign would have us believe he is, such a net worth should be reserved for governments where it’s spread across multiple agencies that have checks and balances and are accountable to voters. I don’t trust any individual with that much power, though I’d trust any random person off the street over anyone ruthless enough to become a billionaire.

And for any of the people saying "he changed".

One of his most recent "philanthropic" ventures was to partner with Nestle (good start) to "modernize and increase yields" of the dairy industries in impoverished countries.

The two organizations then sold modern (likely non-servicable) equipment and entrenched them in corporate supply chain systems geared towards export and making it much harder to trade locally (not sure how that part worked, but was in what I read).

For a grand total of........ 1% increased dairy yields.

Then 3-4 years later they pulled out, leaving heavily indebted farmers without the corporate supply chains and delivery systems they were forced to switch to, and making it very difficult to switch back to the old ways of working, so they can't sell nearly as much locally.

Who do you think will buy up those farms when the farmers go bankrupt and have to sell ar rock bottom prices.

His mother was an influential person on the board of directors of several firms. She met with John Opel, who was the IBM chairman, and secured her son's Microsoft contract with IBM in the 1980s, where it then became dominant and made her a ton of money.

It's vested interests, and who you know.

He sold his first software before it was even finished to his own unuversity.

He saved Apple to avoid an antitrust trial.

It's just business right?