Is Bill Gates as charitable as he seems?
I have previously astounded some friends of mine who brand me with the FOSS-Taliban stamp, by conceding that William H Gates III is doing some valuable philanthropic work through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This gives very serious amounts of money - US$ billions - to humanitarian charities around the world.
An acquaintance of mine, even more cynical than I, interpreted this in a wonderfully bitter way:
Gates has grown to be obscenely rich by finding ways to sell copies of his wretchedly unreliable, bloated software to virtually every human on the planet who can afford a computer. Even those who don't use his products are compelled to buy them, merely to obtain a PC. Now, he's got to the stage where the market's saturated: it can't grow much more, because everyone who wants a PC has one.
But there are billions of people out there who are just too poor to afford computers - and in many cases, they're too busy starving or dying of horrible diseases to want one.
So, he is going to go out there and damned well make them rich and well enough to buy computers, and then they'll have to buy his products!
I find this a wonderfully amusing point of view.
However, my position has been somewhat altered by this splendid bit of investigative journalism from the L A Times:
Dark cloud over good works of Gates Foundation
By Charles Piller, Edmund Sanders and Robyn Dixon
Go read. It's remarkable. I've linked to the single-page version for your convenience; originally, it was 5 pages. There's also a print view if you want to trim the cruft altogether.
An acquaintance of mine, even more cynical than I, interpreted this in a wonderfully bitter way:
Gates has grown to be obscenely rich by finding ways to sell copies of his wretchedly unreliable, bloated software to virtually every human on the planet who can afford a computer. Even those who don't use his products are compelled to buy them, merely to obtain a PC. Now, he's got to the stage where the market's saturated: it can't grow much more, because everyone who wants a PC has one.
But there are billions of people out there who are just too poor to afford computers - and in many cases, they're too busy starving or dying of horrible diseases to want one.
So, he is going to go out there and damned well make them rich and well enough to buy computers, and then they'll have to buy his products!
I find this a wonderfully amusing point of view.
However, my position has been somewhat altered by this splendid bit of investigative journalism from the L A Times:
Dark cloud over good works of Gates Foundation
By Charles Piller, Edmund Sanders and Robyn Dixon
Go read. It's remarkable. I've linked to the single-page version for your convenience; originally, it was 5 pages. There's also a print view if you want to trim the cruft altogether.