Ok, so you're nit-picking how they spend the cash. Fair enough; I doubt, as I've said before, it's going to be perfect, but still there's billions of dollars going into the neediest of countries nevertheless...
No, I'm not "nit-picking". The BMGF's not-for-profit status effectively results in billions of lost revenues to the nation and the economy, much more than the peanuts they hand out. That money is missing for education health care, and other programs. They better be able to demonstrate that their own programs work to justify this. Furthermore, some of their programs may actually be harmful, and many of their investments are not socially responsible.
Actually, it's one area Microsoft really has created something that there's been very little before. Perhaps the closest thing has been Lotus Notes, but really, I doubt you'll find anything that did/does what MOSS/Office does today.
Of course, I won't. What company in their right mind would invest in developing something like MOSS? They know that as soon as they tried, Microsoft would kill them through Microsoft's control of the MS Office suite. That's not hypothetical, they just look at what happened to Lotus.
Maybe one day there'll be an OSS ecosystem just as effective
Our discussion isn't about FOSS, it's about what Microsoft has done to the commercial software market. Microsoft has destroyed a free market in software through its monopolistic practices. FOSS is simply the one business model Microsoft hasn't been able to kill.
actually some MS stuff is popular, really because they did it better than anyone else.
That isn't much of an argument. After destroying the entire market and all its potential major competitors, of course Microsoft "did it better than anyone else".
Look at pen computing. Microsoft killed "Go" through lies and deception, and afterwards, no serious competitor has entered the market again. Microsoft's own attempts at this market have been one failure after another.
No company in their right mind would invest substantial amounts of money in developing a competitive product just to have Microsoft do to them what they have done to so many companies in the '90s. I've sat through numerous meetings were great product idea after great product idea was discarded for just this reason.
Microsoft is an evil company putting out lousy products, and the rest of the industry is going to put a stop to it. I guess it's a good sign that people like you really have no idea what's going on.
I find it interesting that you would give them the benefit of the doubt, when you doubt that they extended the same courtesy.
Innocent until proven guilty isn't a "courtesy" to murderers, it's a fundamental principle of law designed to protect the innocent from being wrongly convicted. That is, it's there to protect you and me.
As the large numbers of wrongful convictions for murder show, the principle is not being applied enough:
Gut feelings, intuition [myersbriggs.org], aren't just random whimsies, they can be your subconscious' way of communicating its' analysis of anothers' subconscious body language and uncontrollable facial subtleties.
They can be. But they are (demonstrably) not reliable enough to convict someone.
The question to ask is whether Reiser should have been convicted. At the time, I thought it was more likely than not that he had done it, but I also thought there wasn't enough physical evidence to convict him beyond a reasonable doubt.
Of course, one can't know what exactly went through the jury's minds, so we should give them the benefit of the doubt. However, I do find it worrisome that several jurors basically said that they convicted him because they didn't like him.
I work for an organization (www.fhi.org) that gets quite a bit of money from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation
You're right that FHI may be doing some good. You're also right that that the Gates foundation is giving money for it. The question is whether the Gates Foundation comes out ahead in an overall cost/benefit analysis relative to other funding models.
I think your posting just shows that (1) Gates' attempt to white-wash his reputation through "charity" is working to some degree, and that (2) people at organizations like FHI apparently lack even a basic ability to reason about economic and social issues.
I sincerely hope that you aren't representative for FHI because with your lack of critical thinking, you are hardly in a position to deal with complex issues of international public health.
There's some serious trolling going on in this site; people, amazingly seem to thing donating billions to charity is a bad thing compared to GPL freedoms. Are zealots really going to go so low as to try and piss on a charitable campaign because it was done by a guy who made a stack off selling his own code
Are you really so stupid to think that that's the argument people are making? Do you guys get a lobotomy when you get hired at Microsoft?
Or are you deliberately trying to tarnish the reputation of the open source community by misrepresenting their positions?
Which part of "looking at their portfolio" did you not understand? I know what they are doing. Now, why don't you show me that this is the most effective allocation of these resources. And in what way is Jeff Raikes qualified to make decisions about public health policy in third world nations?
There's more choice now than there's ever been,
Says who? You? I've been in this business since the 1970's, and I think that statement is simply false. What is true that there is more choice again than during the worst time of Microsoft's reign, no thanks to Microsoft.
FireFox is of course the prime example. OpenOffice too provides much of what a lot of users would use in MS Office, but ultimately things like Office provide a lot the alternatives just don't have.
Yeah, now look at the history of where those came from: two companies that were driven out of business through Microsoft's monopolistic practices. And the fact that two projects financed on a shoestring budget relative to Microsoft's products are worth even mentioning by someone like you should be an embarrassment.
Look at the Office/Microsoft Office Server System ecosystem for just one example - there's nothing that out of the box provides that experience.
So, how again do people have a choice if "nothing out of the box provides that experience"?
And what do you think are the reasons that "nothing out of the box provides that experience"? Microsoft's unique insights and inventiveness in groupware technologies? Don't make me laugh.
While you might think people haven't looked for alternatives, sometimes it makes sense to go Microsoft.
Oh, right now, it still frequently makes sense to "go Microsoft"; I don't dispute that at all. That's usually because Microsoft either killed all the alternatives or managed to create a situation in which choosing anything other than Microsoft is risky. There are some products where Microsoft is actually a technically good choice (I'm fond of Microsoft mice), but they don't matter in the grand scheme of things.
some of the choices are making real inroads into Microsoft territory
Well, thank goodness that we're finally managing to recover from the Microsoft dark ages. It has taken long enough.
Wow. Just wow. What you're saying is that because the foundation may not be whiter than white in it's accounting practises (not all that uncommon in any organisation involving money), then pull the plug on the whole thing
No, I am saying that, looking at their portfolio, I do not believe that the Gates Foundation actually does much good. Again, that's because of their portfolio, not because of their name or their accounting practices.
What organizations like the BMGF do to third world nations is demeaning, dehumanizing, and ineffective.
Believe it or not, people actually CHOOSE Microsoft software too! Incredible, I'm sure for you to comprehend, but not all Microsoft software comes on every PC! Windows client, perhaps, but that's about it. The rest, Office for example, you have to pay for...and big bucks too. People choose it above the rest because actually, it's quite good!
Above WHAT rest? Microsoft killed almost meaningful competition through their illegal practices. Microsoft killed even any feasible funding strategy for anybody wanting to compete with them on the desktop.
You can be sure that the vast majority of Microsoft customers never even evaluated an alternative and don't even know that there is one. That's not "choice". And even people who are aware of alternatives will stick with Microsoft, not because it's better, but because they worry about file incompatibilities. Doubtlessly, there are many users that are reasonably satisfied with Microsoft products, but that is not the same as saying that they made a choice; they never had a choice because Microsoft killed it.
I'm amazed you literally think Gates is the devil
I don't think he is the devil. I think he is a smart but ruthless and sleazy businessman. He's nowhere near the worst among that class of people. But the kind of sleaze Bill Gates has engaged in actually affects me, while, say, Michael Szymanczyk doesn't.
you might not agree with his business practises or indeed like his software, but ultimately, the guy is a human being, and it's just possible this foundation of his is genuinely for the greater good of people not as fortunate as us.
You are operating under the mistaken assumption that I dislike the BMGF because it is associated with Bill Gates. I don't. I think that foundations like the BMGF are in general a bad way of attempting to help third world nations.
You sound like the typical Microsoft employee who thinks that all dislike of Microsoft and Bill Gates is some class envy and that Microsoft products can't be that bad because so many people are using them. You're living in a dreamland.
Because you said "It's no more or less convenient than any other language." If it's no more or less convenient than any other language, in particular, it's no more or less convenient than Fortran. So, why not use Fortran, you dolt?
I still don't understand in what way you think it's inconvenient. Care to actually explain?
Few would recommend Erlang as a high-performance string manipulating language. Strings in erlang are simply lists of characters, with a bit of syntactic sugar to allow you to easily construct such lists as text enclosed within quotation marks. In fact, to quote Sendmail's excellent case studyin implementing their Sendmail load balancing "Client Daemon" in Erlang:
But Erlang's treatment of strings as lists of bytes is as elegant as it is impractical. The factor-of-eight storage expansion of text, as well as the copying that occurs during message-passing, cripples Erlang for all but the most performance-insensitive text-processing applications.
I couldn't believe it that in 2008, Erlang still hasn't fixed this, and this is just one of many problems with Erlang for real-world applications.
I'm all for functional, safe languages. I like syntax different from C/Java. The problem is that the functional programming community produces one language disaster after another by always screwing up on one or more important things: string handling, numerics, syntax, error messages, usability, I/O, etc.
In the end, most applications do the "heavy lifting" in parts like string handling, disk I/O, and numerics. It's a lot easier to get the job done writing that in a language that has excellent syntactic and library support and than add on a little bit of communications on top. And there are excellent Erlang-style communications libraries for other languages.
Mis-designed languages like Erlang can still solve some problems (CouchDB) really well, but a language that I can use even for 50% of my jobs simply isn't worth bothering.
Languages like C and Java keep winning because designers of languages like Erlang are too lazy, arrogant, and stupid to do their job right. In different words, languages like Erlang is what's killing functional programming.
1) Actually, there are quite a few good reasons for this, largely around the complete elimination of mutexing and locks. Just because you don't understand the purpose doesn't mean there wasn't one.
The existence of mutable variables doesn't mean that you need locks. You can use Erlang-style message passing between threads, and still have the convenience of mutable variables where it is safe.
2) Oooooh, a language is faulty because it has a syntax with which you are not familiar. Immediately kill all non-Java clones!
Well, this particular syntax comes from Prolog, and it wasn't any good in Prolog either.
3) They're just lists of numbers; they're neither ASCII nor Latin1. There is unicode parsing in the XMERL module.
That's another thing Erlang inherited from Prolog. Given the importance of strings, representing them as lists of numbers is ridiculous. And properly processing unicode requires a lot more than just "parsing".
You mean to the detriment to all 'freeloaders' right? Reasonable people don't mind paying others for their work/labor, only unreasonable freeloaders do.
I agree completely. And two of the biggest, unreasonable freeloaders around are Microsoft and Apple, as a simple look at their history and financials shows.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Perhaps they should close the foundation? Is that what you want, exactly?
Actually, yes, that is what I want: he would be paying taxes on it, and more of it would be available to the public.
And to say MS only make cash through an illegal monopoly is ridiculous
I actually didn't say that, but now that you bring it up, yes, it's basically true: arguably, Microsoft wouldn't even exist today without their monopolistic business practices, so 100% of their revenue is due to those practices.
Millions of people choose MS software, even when "free" exists elsewhere.
Almost nobody chooses MS software; people get it by default, whether they want to or not, because of Gates' bundling and tying agreements.
Gates has earnt a lot of money, for sure. Unlike many others in his category, he's putting some of it to good use.
No, he is not.
RMS can criticise when he's invested similar $$$ into 3rd world
I'm sorry, but that's not how a democracy (or a republic) works. The fact that Gates managed to cheat his way into billions of dollars doesn't make him an expert on foreign aid or social policy. And anybody has the right and duty to criticize people like Gates and, more importantly, take democratic action against them if they believe they are doing wrong.
It gets good mpg relative to bigger vehicles. But put the same motor in a velomobile and you'll have a car-like vehicle that probably gets even better mpg and/or reaches higher speeds.
You know progressive taxation doesn't work that way, right?
Yes. I wasn't talking about progressive taxation. The tax code is full of weird thresholds and triggers. I'm not privy to Gates's tax returns, but I certainly have been able to "save $20k by giving $10k" on my return.
Just to be clear, non-profits can't actually advertise in return for deductible contributions.
But the Gates Foundation does, and it gets away with it. Or what would you call putting Windows in schools and libraries around the world?
In the general case, this isn't true. IRS publication 526 makes it clear that you can't make deduct more than your basis in donated property.
Well, golly gee, I guess that really settles it! Gates would never do anything that might get around IRS publication 526! I mean, it would be unethical!
So, when you have RMS protesting a charity, it builds negative associations that can greatly hurt the community.
What's wrong with "protesting a charity"? The Gates Foundation has been criticized by many people, not just Stallman. And the fact that the Gates Foundation is a vehicle for promoting Windows means that it is highly relevant to FOSS users.
Is this for real or is it a linguistic trick of technicalities?
Your viewpoint is extremely literal. I understand it.
No, you don't. It seems "extremely literal" to you because you simply know next to nothing.
Is RMS the spokesman for theFree Software Foundation? You said so yourself in your own post. Is RMS going to be very closely associated with FOSS? Totally.
If free software had been pussy-footing around for the last 20 years, it would be dead and Microsoft would own the entire industry. People need to speak up about how evil Microsoft actually has been and what kind of self-serving organization the Gates Foundation is. Maybe sooner or later, even you will get the message.
If Microsoft was "failing at everything they do", they wouldn't have beaten earnings expectations for the past 4 quarters according to Earnings Whispers.
Microsoft beats earning expectations because they manipulate those expectations.
And to say that RMS is not a spokesman is downright absurd. When the general audience reads an article like this in the paper, they equate RMS with FOSS.
A spokesman is a person that has a specific function relative to an organization. RMS is a spokesman for the Free Software Foundation. He is not a spokesman for the people who produce free software (for example, Linus is one of the biggest producers of free software, and neither Linus nor RMS would say that either speaks for the other). And RMS has nothing to do with FOSS; he hates the concept of open source software.
You have done an excellent job at just further reinforcing your viewpoint, not the reality of the situation.
The fault is with your understanding, not with reality or my explanation of it.
To suggest that "Microsoft is failing at everything they do" is just ridiculous.
It's not ridiculous, it's true.
Microsoft is concerned about the generation of DOLLARS. Their rules are about making MONEY.
Yes. That includes current revenues and expected future revenues. Microsoft is still doing OK on current revenues. If they keep flopping, they will be doing poorly on future revenues, and their lackluster performance shows that that's what people expect.
Stallman is a horrible spokesperson, in the sense that he allows himself through his own words to be defined as a kook, allowing his goals to be written of as the rantings of a madman.
Stallman isn't a "spokesperson", he's an individual, and one that has accomplished a lot.
Gates is as much of a kook as Stallman, but Stallman is honest, while Gates is also a crook.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, so you're nit-picking how they spend the cash. Fair enough; I doubt, as I've said before, it's going to be perfect, but still there's billions of dollars going into the neediest of countries nevertheless...
No, I'm not "nit-picking". The BMGF's not-for-profit status effectively results in billions of lost revenues to the nation and the economy, much more than the peanuts they hand out. That money is missing for education health care, and other programs. They better be able to demonstrate that their own programs work to justify this. Furthermore, some of their programs may actually be harmful, and many of their investments are not socially responsible.
Actually, it's one area Microsoft really has created something that there's been very little before. Perhaps the closest thing has been Lotus Notes, but really, I doubt you'll find anything that did/does what MOSS/Office does today.
Of course, I won't. What company in their right mind would invest in developing something like MOSS? They know that as soon as they tried, Microsoft would kill them through Microsoft's control of the MS Office suite. That's not hypothetical, they just look at what happened to Lotus.
Maybe one day there'll be an OSS ecosystem just as effective
Our discussion isn't about FOSS, it's about what Microsoft has done to the commercial software market. Microsoft has destroyed a free market in software through its monopolistic practices. FOSS is simply the one business model Microsoft hasn't been able to kill.
actually some MS stuff is popular, really because they did it better than anyone else.
That isn't much of an argument. After destroying the entire market and all its potential major competitors, of course Microsoft "did it better than anyone else".
Look at pen computing. Microsoft killed "Go" through lies and deception, and afterwards, no serious competitor has entered the market again. Microsoft's own attempts at this market have been one failure after another.
No company in their right mind would invest substantial amounts of money in developing a competitive product just to have Microsoft do to them what they have done to so many companies in the '90s. I've sat through numerous meetings were great product idea after great product idea was discarded for just this reason.
Microsoft is an evil company putting out lousy products, and the rest of the industry is going to put a stop to it. I guess it's a good sign that people like you really have no idea what's going on.
I find it interesting that you would give them the benefit of the doubt, when you doubt that they extended the same courtesy.
Innocent until proven guilty isn't a "courtesy" to murderers, it's a fundamental principle of law designed to protect the innocent from being wrongly convicted. That is, it's there to protect you and me.
As the large numbers of wrongful convictions for murder show, the principle is not being applied enough:
http://www.innocenceproject.org/
Gut feelings, intuition [myersbriggs.org], aren't just random whimsies, they can be your subconscious' way of communicating its' analysis of anothers' subconscious body language and uncontrollable facial subtleties.
They can be. But they are (demonstrably) not reliable enough to convict someone.
You're asking the wrong question.
The question to ask is whether Reiser should have been convicted. At the time, I thought it was more likely than not that he had done it, but I also thought there wasn't enough physical evidence to convict him beyond a reasonable doubt.
Of course, one can't know what exactly went through the jury's minds, so we should give them the benefit of the doubt. However, I do find it worrisome that several jurors basically said that they convicted him because they didn't like him.
I work for an organization (www.fhi.org) that gets quite a bit of money from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation
You're right that FHI may be doing some good. You're also right that that the Gates foundation is giving money for it. The question is whether the Gates Foundation comes out ahead in an overall cost/benefit analysis relative to other funding models.
I think your posting just shows that (1) Gates' attempt to white-wash his reputation through "charity" is working to some degree, and that (2) people at organizations like FHI apparently lack even a basic ability to reason about economic and social issues.
I sincerely hope that you aren't representative for FHI because with your lack of critical thinking, you are hardly in a position to deal with complex issues of international public health.
There's some serious trolling going on in this site; people, amazingly seem to thing donating billions to charity is a bad thing compared to GPL freedoms. Are zealots really going to go so low as to try and piss on a charitable campaign because it was done by a guy who made a stack off selling his own code
Are you really so stupid to think that that's the argument people are making? Do you guys get a lobotomy when you get hired at Microsoft?
Or are you deliberately trying to tarnish the reputation of the open source community by misrepresenting their positions?
Ok, take a look at this link - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_and_Melinda_Gates_Foundation#Activities and tell me again it's ineffective.
Which part of "looking at their portfolio" did you not understand? I know what they are doing. Now, why don't you show me that this is the most effective allocation of these resources. And in what way is Jeff Raikes qualified to make decisions about public health policy in third world nations?
There's more choice now than there's ever been,
Says who? You? I've been in this business since the 1970's, and I think that statement is simply false. What is true that there is more choice again than during the worst time of Microsoft's reign, no thanks to Microsoft.
FireFox is of course the prime example. OpenOffice too provides much of what a lot of users would use in MS Office, but ultimately things like Office provide a lot the alternatives just don't have.
Yeah, now look at the history of where those came from: two companies that were driven out of business through Microsoft's monopolistic practices. And the fact that two projects financed on a shoestring budget relative to Microsoft's products are worth even mentioning by someone like you should be an embarrassment.
Look at the Office/Microsoft Office Server System ecosystem for just one example - there's nothing that out of the box provides that experience.
So, how again do people have a choice if "nothing out of the box provides that experience"?
And what do you think are the reasons that "nothing out of the box provides that experience"? Microsoft's unique insights and inventiveness in groupware technologies? Don't make me laugh.
While you might think people haven't looked for alternatives, sometimes it makes sense to go Microsoft.
Oh, right now, it still frequently makes sense to "go Microsoft"; I don't dispute that at all. That's usually because Microsoft either killed all the alternatives or managed to create a situation in which choosing anything other than Microsoft is risky. There are some products where Microsoft is actually a technically good choice (I'm fond of Microsoft mice), but they don't matter in the grand scheme of things.
some of the choices are making real inroads into Microsoft territory
Well, thank goodness that we're finally managing to recover from the Microsoft dark ages. It has taken long enough.
Trying to retrofit C into Tamarin seems bizarre. Why not use an on-the-fly sandboxing native C compiler? Tiny C (tcc) would seem like a good start.
http://bellard.org/tcc/
Wow. Just wow. What you're saying is that because the foundation may not be whiter than white in it's accounting practises (not all that uncommon in any organisation involving money), then pull the plug on the whole thing
No, I am saying that, looking at their portfolio, I do not believe that the Gates Foundation actually does much good. Again, that's because of their portfolio, not because of their name or their accounting practices.
What organizations like the BMGF do to third world nations is demeaning, dehumanizing, and ineffective.
Believe it or not, people actually CHOOSE Microsoft software too! Incredible, I'm sure for you to comprehend, but not all Microsoft software comes on every PC! Windows client, perhaps, but that's about it. The rest, Office for example, you have to pay for...and big bucks too. People choose it above the rest because actually, it's quite good!
Above WHAT rest? Microsoft killed almost meaningful competition through their illegal practices. Microsoft killed even any feasible funding strategy for anybody wanting to compete with them on the desktop.
You can be sure that the vast majority of Microsoft customers never even evaluated an alternative and don't even know that there is one. That's not "choice". And even people who are aware of alternatives will stick with Microsoft, not because it's better, but because they worry about file incompatibilities. Doubtlessly, there are many users that are reasonably satisfied with Microsoft products, but that is not the same as saying that they made a choice; they never had a choice because Microsoft killed it.
I'm amazed you literally think Gates is the devil
I don't think he is the devil. I think he is a smart but ruthless and sleazy businessman. He's nowhere near the worst among that class of people. But the kind of sleaze Bill Gates has engaged in actually affects me, while, say, Michael Szymanczyk doesn't.
you might not agree with his business practises or indeed like his software, but ultimately, the guy is a human being, and it's just possible this foundation of his is genuinely for the greater good of people not as fortunate as us.
You are operating under the mistaken assumption that I dislike the BMGF because it is associated with Bill Gates. I don't. I think that foundations like the BMGF are in general a bad way of attempting to help third world nations.
You sound like the typical Microsoft employee who thinks that all dislike of Microsoft and Bill Gates is some class envy and that Microsoft products can't be that bad because so many people are using them. You're living in a dreamland.
Why would I want to use Fortran you dolt?
Because you said "It's no more or less convenient than any other language." If it's no more or less convenient than any other language, in particular, it's no more or less convenient than Fortran. So, why not use Fortran, you dolt?
I still don't understand in what way you think it's inconvenient. Care to actually explain?
As an example, take strings:
http://schemecookbook.org/Erlang/StringBasics
I couldn't believe it that in 2008, Erlang still hasn't fixed this, and this is just one of many problems with Erlang for real-world applications.
I'm all for functional, safe languages. I like syntax different from C/Java. The problem is that the functional programming community produces one language disaster after another by always screwing up on one or more important things: string handling, numerics, syntax, error messages, usability, I/O, etc.
In the end, most applications do the "heavy lifting" in parts like string handling, disk I/O, and numerics. It's a lot easier to get the job done writing that in a language that has excellent syntactic and library support and than add on a little bit of communications on top. And there are excellent Erlang-style communications libraries for other languages.
Mis-designed languages like Erlang can still solve some problems (CouchDB) really well, but a language that I can use even for 50% of my jobs simply isn't worth bothering.
Languages like C and Java keep winning because designers of languages like Erlang are too lazy, arrogant, and stupid to do their job right. In different words, languages like Erlang is what's killing functional programming.
1) Actually, there are quite a few good reasons for this, largely around the complete elimination of mutexing and locks. Just because you don't understand the purpose doesn't mean there wasn't one.
The existence of mutable variables doesn't mean that you need locks. You can use Erlang-style message passing between threads, and still have the convenience of mutable variables where it is safe.
2) Oooooh, a language is faulty because it has a syntax with which you are not familiar. Immediately kill all non-Java clones!
Well, this particular syntax comes from Prolog, and it wasn't any good in Prolog either.
3) They're just lists of numbers; they're neither ASCII nor Latin1. There is unicode parsing in the XMERL module.
That's another thing Erlang inherited from Prolog. Given the importance of strings, representing them as lists of numbers is ridiculous. And properly processing unicode requires a lot more than just "parsing".
You mean to the detriment to all 'freeloaders' right? Reasonable people don't mind paying others for their work/labor, only unreasonable freeloaders do.
I agree completely. And two of the biggest, unreasonable freeloaders around are Microsoft and Apple, as a simple look at their history and financials shows.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Mac OS X and Windows XP are the night.
Perhaps they should close the foundation? Is that what you want, exactly?
Actually, yes, that is what I want: he would be paying taxes on it, and more of it would be available to the public.
And to say MS only make cash through an illegal monopoly is ridiculous
I actually didn't say that, but now that you bring it up, yes, it's basically true: arguably, Microsoft wouldn't even exist today without their monopolistic business practices, so 100% of their revenue is due to those practices.
Millions of people choose MS software, even when "free" exists elsewhere.
Almost nobody chooses MS software; people get it by default, whether they want to or not, because of Gates' bundling and tying agreements.
Gates has earnt a lot of money, for sure. Unlike many others in his category, he's putting some of it to good use.
No, he is not.
RMS can criticise when he's invested similar $$$ into 3rd world
I'm sorry, but that's not how a democracy (or a republic) works. The fact that Gates managed to cheat his way into billions of dollars doesn't make him an expert on foreign aid or social policy. And anybody has the right and duty to criticize people like Gates and, more importantly, take democratic action against them if they believe they are doing wrong.
Erlang is a language that has all the right properties and mechanisms in place to do what utility computing requires.
Well, except that it's darned inconvenient to actually write the applications in it.
Google Gears is using Erlang-style concurrency, and the list goes on."
Yup, and it makes more sense to add "Erlang-style concurrency" to existing languages than to throw out everything and switch to Erlang.
Even if they can figure out how you voted, the "sale" is not an enforceable contract.
Incidentally, the calculation in "How Secret is Your Ballot?" is wrong.
It gets good mpg relative to bigger vehicles. But put the same motor in a velomobile and you'll have a car-like vehicle that probably gets even better mpg and/or reaches higher speeds.
This is not RMS' argument.
Nor did I say it was. My argument was about why it is reasonable for an advocate of free software to make public pronouncements about these things.
You know progressive taxation doesn't work that way, right?
Yes. I wasn't talking about progressive taxation. The tax code is full of weird thresholds and triggers. I'm not privy to Gates's tax returns, but I certainly have been able to "save $20k by giving $10k" on my return.
Just to be clear, non-profits can't actually advertise in return for deductible contributions.
But the Gates Foundation does, and it gets away with it. Or what would you call putting Windows in schools and libraries around the world?
In the general case, this isn't true. IRS publication 526 makes it clear that you can't make deduct more than your basis in donated property.
Well, golly gee, I guess that really settles it! Gates would never do anything that might get around IRS publication 526! I mean, it would be unethical!
Income Taxes in the US are a tiered system.
Don't I know it, Mr. Obvious. Now, go read the rest of the tax code.
Do you have any evidence for this statement?
Are you living under a rock? Go search on Google.
http://www.billparish.com/msftfraudfacts.html
So, when you have RMS protesting a charity, it builds negative associations that can greatly hurt the community.
What's wrong with "protesting a charity"? The Gates Foundation has been criticized by many people, not just Stallman. And the fact that the Gates Foundation is a vehicle for promoting Windows means that it is highly relevant to FOSS users.
Is this for real or is it a linguistic trick of technicalities?
That's about as dumb as confusing Switzerland and Sweden
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html
Your viewpoint is extremely literal. I understand it.
No, you don't. It seems "extremely literal" to you because you simply know next to nothing.
Is RMS the spokesman for theFree Software Foundation? You said so yourself in your own post. Is RMS going to be very closely associated with FOSS? Totally.
If free software had been pussy-footing around for the last 20 years, it would be dead and Microsoft would own the entire industry. People need to speak up about how evil Microsoft actually has been and what kind of self-serving organization the Gates Foundation is. Maybe sooner or later, even you will get the message.
If Microsoft was "failing at everything they do", they wouldn't have beaten earnings expectations for the past 4 quarters according to Earnings Whispers.
Microsoft beats earning expectations because they manipulate those expectations.
And to say that RMS is not a spokesman is downright absurd. When the general audience reads an article like this in the paper, they equate RMS with FOSS.
A spokesman is a person that has a specific function relative to an organization. RMS is a spokesman for the Free Software Foundation. He is not a spokesman for the people who produce free software (for example, Linus is one of the biggest producers of free software, and neither Linus nor RMS would say that either speaks for the other). And RMS has nothing to do with FOSS; he hates the concept of open source software.
You have done an excellent job at just further reinforcing your viewpoint, not the reality of the situation.
The fault is with your understanding, not with reality or my explanation of it.
Like when you're $10k over some limit that then causes you to pay an extra $20k in taxes.
Or like when you pay $10k to a charity that then results in $20k in business for you.
Or like when you declare the donation of a product that cost you $10k to produce as a $20k donation.
Mopeds are fuel-inefficient. They're also slow and no fun in the rain or snow.
or are you just REALLY happy to see me?
To suggest that "Microsoft is failing at everything they do" is just ridiculous.
It's not ridiculous, it's true.
Microsoft is concerned about the generation of DOLLARS. Their rules are about making MONEY.
Yes. That includes current revenues and expected future revenues. Microsoft is still doing OK on current revenues. If they keep flopping, they will be doing poorly on future revenues, and their lackluster performance shows that that's what people expect.
Stallman is a horrible spokesperson, in the sense that he allows himself through his own words to be defined as a kook, allowing his goals to be written of as the rantings of a madman.
Stallman isn't a "spokesperson", he's an individual, and one that has accomplished a lot.
Gates is as much of a kook as Stallman, but Stallman is honest, while Gates is also a crook.