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Bill Gates Sides With FBI In Apple Spat (ft.com)
Fudge Factor 3000 writes: Bill Gates has now publicly stated that Apple should cooperate with the FBI in the San Bernadino terrorist's phone unlocking case. He states that it is for this specific case, but seems to miss the point that there are other law enforcement officials waiting on the wings with their requests should this precedent be set. The war against privacy escalates. Setting aside the actual practicality of unlocking the San Bernadino phone, the teams that are emerging on this issue include some pretty strange bedfellows: John McAfee and Bill Gates on the pro-unlocking side, and Woz, Edward Snowden and even some of the victim's families on the con.
Well, no, he didn't make anyone use windows. He made deals with OEMs stating, hey, your PC here is going to be running windows at some point, so you'll have to pay me a license fee. The PC OEMs who jumped on board are the ones that made users use windows, because they were essentially paying for it with the price of the PC, they could have offered you the competitor (who exactly was that at the time? IBM? Zerox?) It's all hip and fun to bash on MS and gates, but at least lay blame where it belongs. He worked a deal with the OEMs, they had the choice to opt in or not, they sold you out. And guess what..... for that very reason we have MACs and Linux to complete with MS. We likely wouldn't have the cool tech we do have if not for some shady behind the scenes deals.
From his time as Microsoft CEO, Bill Gates was all about removing choice, and making computer users use Windows software by making deals with PC OEMs.
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It comes as no surprise that Bill Gates gives privacy so little weight, with less privacy users have less choice and control.
s/Bill Gates/Lennart Poettering/g;
s/Windows/systemd/g;
s/PC OEMs/Linux Distributions/g;