From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lee@piclab.com)
Date: Mon Nov 18 2002 - 11:25:51 MST
> (Samantha Atkins <samantha@objectent.com>):
>
> How dare people act as if Bill Gates is some kind of saint. This
> is a level of dishonesty that I find utterly unforgiveable.
> - samantha
It is equally unforgivable to treat him as a demon just for
being a good businessman. I have no doubt that if a few of his
less savory tactics were taken away, he'd be worth less--say a
mere 20 billion. But that would still make him one of the
greatest creators of wealth in human history, and on balance
he's done a lot of good for the world. I happen to run Linux
at home, but I'm not so naive about economics that I can't
recognize that the existence of even my non-Intel non-MS machine
owes a lot to the markets fueled by Microsoft.
During my employment in Redmond I was fortunate enough to meet
the man, and talk to him, and he's just an ordinary nerd like
the rest of us; he doesn't eat babies or sacrifice virgins or
even cackle with delight at the thought of putting competitors
in the poor house. He /does/ rejoice at being able to make
lots and lots of money, and I for one see that as the noblest
of motives. Not only do I approve of the motive, I approve of
most of the actions taken to achieve it, with the exception of
the use of copyrights and patents (which is hard to fault because
most of the country seems to agree with him on those) and his
broken contract with Sun. Most of the "crimes" everyone else
accuses him of aren't crimes at all--just good business.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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