Bill Gates hate Windows? Awesome.

[Tanner1294]

I found an article not long ago from around the time Windows XP came out with Bill Gates stating that he didn't like Windows and stopped using a few years before. I also found a great email thread of Bill's troubles trying to install the latest version of Movie Maker while running into many problems with Windows.

http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/...s-e-mail-rant/

I can't find the interview about his switch from Windows now... Oh and by the way it was Bill who said once that Linux was an amazing thing because it's millions of people together to create some amazing things. It was Steve Ballmer who's stated numerous times that Linux is a "cancer" in the software world. <-- Bill has condemned Ballmer on stage for that haha.

[bsniadajewski]

Re: Bill Gates hate Windows? Awesome.

Well, I guess he isn't as evil as people think he is, eh? It is reasonable, I think, that a guy like him (somewhat) respects the work of other geeks, even if it's for something other than Microsoft.

[Linkmaster]

Re: Bill Gates hate Windows? Awesome.

Bill Gates understands Linux really well, and I honestly dont' know why people bash on him. He did exactly what the Linux community started out with, but profiteered it instead, which you can't blame, people like money. But when Ballmer came to be CEO, thats when the "Linux is bad" etc. started coming around. Gates created Windows, he very likely respects Linux for what we are, especially with Ballmer trying to shut us down[and failing]

[GreyGeek]

Re: Bill Gates hate Windows? Awesome.

Gates was a micro-manager. Everything Microsoft did was his idea or done with his approval.

Gates, who pulled BASIC code out of Yale dumpsters and used it to write the BASIC for Altair, has not been adverse to taking what he wanted in the past. He began by taking US tax payer dollars to write Win95, by taking rebates from the US Treasury when their coders cashed in stock options. Other companies pay their employes and take the payroll expenses off of their income, leaving less for research, development and advertising. Gates not only avoided payroll costs, he was PAID by Uncle Sam to write Win95. So, he kept more of his income for profit and had it supplemented by nothing less than corporate welfare payments from Uncle.

In the DOJ vs Microsoft trial Gates tried to prove that IE could be removed from Windows without harming its functions as on OS. He played a video demonstrating the removal process and claimed it was shot continuously. A sharp-eyed prosecutor noticed a significant laps in time on the video, showing it was not shot continuously as claimed, and that the ability to remove IE was misrepresented. Gates declined to demonstrate the process live, in court.

Much of the "innovation" by Microsoft in the 1990s was due to a technique which could be described as cherry picking. Gates would notice some innovative product by a startup and offer to become "partners" with them. But first, they had to "verify" the technology, which required Microsoft engineers look at it and its code. With $$$ filling their eyes, the startup owner would agree, after first requiring Microsoft (Bill Gates) to sign an NDA. (Which was stupid. Why would Gates disclose to others a technology he planed to steal?). After the MS engineers poured over the technology and picked it clean they'd leave. The next time the startup heard from Microsoft was when they released a product based on the technology they cherry picked. Lawsuits usually followed, but I can recall only one, a French company, which won $2M. That hardly paid for their legal fees. One of the first examples of Microsoft "innovating" by cherry picking a startup was when Jerry Kaplan was picked clean of his "Go Pen" technology. He sued years later.

Among the documents introduced in court this week was a letter from June 1990 in which Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman, told Andrew S. Grove, the chief executive of Intel at the time, that any support given to the Go Corporation, a Silicon Valley software company, would be considered an aggressive move against Microsoft.

Other evidence presented by the plaintiffs' lawyers at trial yesterday gave an account of how Microsoft violated a signed secrecy agreement with Go and showed that Microsoft possessed technical documents from Go that it should not have had access to.
....
Documents presented at that trial included some email showing Microsoft violated NDAs with Go, and "then used that information to build PenWindows, a competitor to Go's PenPoint operating system," Markoff reported. There was also a letter from Gates to Intel's Andy Grove on the theme that Intel should use a version of Windows for portable computers instead of Go's PenPoint.

The letter read in part:

"I guess I've made it very clear that we view an Intel investment in Go as an anti-Microsoft move, both because Go competes with our systems software and because we think it will weaken the 386 PC standard."

Shortly afterwards, according to Mr. Kaplan's testimony, Intel reduced its investment in Go from $10 million to $2 million and insisted that even that level of investment be kept secret.

He has "innovated" products from dozens if not hundreds of other individuals and corporations and he used the power of his legal department to avoid punishment, or minimize it.

Since his departure, Microsoft is still following in Gates footsteps. You can see it in VISTA and Win7. If you have ever installed Win7 you can see what, for all practical purposes, looks like exact copies of the installation screens for Kubuntu. When the desktop is installed you swear, except for the Windows icons, that you were running KDE 4.x, which was out long before Microsoft was forced to create Win7 as an emergency replacement for VISTA.

I won't get into the other examples I've posted in previous msgs in various topics, but IMO Gates was as evil as one can get. Only his powerful legal department, his father's D.C. legal firm, and the "campaign contributions" to our elected officials kept him out of jail. IF it hadn't been for the election of Bush the victorious DOJ legal team wouldn't have been replaced by MS lawn jockey lawyers who stole defeat out of the jaws of victory. Otherwise, Microsoft would have received a corporate death penalty.

There used to be a website which detailed Microsoft's sin, but it is archived now. It concerns technical aspects:
http://web.archive.org/web/200805190...whatsbad.shtml
and replace those asterisks with you least liked f-word.
And this site concerns financial and political aspects:
http://billparish.com/msftfraudfacts.html

[Goeroeboeroe]

Re: Bill Gates hate Windows? Awesome.

That's a pretty strong story, GreyGeek. As another grey person I would add that it was Microsoft under Bill Gates that tried to own the complete internet and tried to force everybody to use Windows by forcing people to make sites you could only see with Internet Explorer.
If not a very few people had gone on with Netscape (now Firefox) probably everybody had to pay money to Microsoft for every mail we sent, for every site we visit, etc.
Nowadays the noble Bill Gates does exactly the same thing with fighting malaria: running like an elephant through every existing program with his millions, mainly favoring big corporations.

[de_koraco]

Re: Bill Gates hate Windows? Awesome.

About IE and the inerwebz, i always remember this old article - demoroniser

[GreyGeek]

Re: Bill Gates hate Windows? Awesome.

....
Nowadays the noble Bill Gates does exactly the same thing with fighting malaria: running like an elephant through every existing program with his millions, mainly favoring big corporations.

I didn't mention his Charity. There are several examples which Google can find in which Gates gave awards to educational and medical institutions in which he required that any computers and software purchased must run Windows and Microsoft applications. These charitable "donations" were actually funneled money right back to his company.

http://techrights.org/2007/11/28/pat...000&height=540

[GreyGeek]

Re: Bill Gates hate Windows? Awesome.

I shouldn't let this thread pass without mentioning one of Microsoft's worse offenses: the corruption of the European Union open source strategy paper. The original document is color coded and easier to read, but I wanted to post the majority of the article here because examples of this hi-jacking seem to disappear from the web.

http://blog.javier-carrete.com/2010/...s-on-plan.html

Open source is an outsider, not part of the establishment. One price it pays for this is not being privy to all the decisions that are made in the field of governmental policy. Too often, established players are involved without any counterbalancing input from the free software side. Generally, we don't see all the machinations and deals that go on here behind closed doors. But thanks to the increasingly indispensable Wikileaks, we have the opportunity to observe how an organisation close to Microsoft is attempting to re-write –and hijack– an important European Union open source strategy paper.
...
What makes this document fascinating is that it contains both the original and modified text (in glorious colour, so it's really worth downloading it and taking a look), which means that we can see what exactly an organisation sympathetic to Microsoft –and partly funded by them– is worried about, and how it is trying to head off the threat.

The dominant theme of the changes is foregrounding what the paper calls “mixed mode” or “mixed source”: using open source with proprietary code in hybrid solutions. For example, early on, the Context is originally described as:

To be provided as part of the OSS work group work and V2 of the EC document

But the ACT wants to change that is to this:

To be provided as part of the OSS work group work and V2 of the EC document, while noting that the increasing use of OSS within mainstream commercial offerings and mixed-source software and solutions makes a distinct treatment of or preferences for OSS more difficult to define.

Similarly, the Scope goes from

In this document OSS covers :
Open Source providers (OSS communities),
Service providers for OSS integration and support,

to

In this document OSS covers:
Open Source providers (OSS communities),
Service providers for OSS integration and support,
OSS as part of mixed solutions blending open and proprietary code.

It's easy to see the hand of Microsoft in this, albeit indirectly, since this is precisely the current line it is pushing: that, yes, open source has its place, but that place is in a world where open source and proprietary are treated as if they were the same thing, and ignoring the special characteristics of the former so as to negate them.

Here's another telling change, later on, when this:

At the current point in time it is impossible to predict when and if that trend will come to an end the future of mixed mode. New companies enter the market with models spanning the entire range of proprietary models over mixed models to OSS models. Only time will show which models will be most successful in Europe.

becomes this:

At the current point in time it is impossible to predict the future of mixed mode. New companies enter the market with models spanning the entire range of proprietary models over mixed models to OSS models. The economic success of firms based on mixed model, however, suggests it is a promising model for the future.

As you might expect, the issue of intellectual monopolies is another area where the ACT is keen to re-write the facts. Indeed, this document's changes show that it wants the *whole* of the following to be deleted, since it was clearly far too near the knuckle for lovers of intellectual monopolies:

There were heated debates about patent licensing schemes. We provide the following point as an input to Workgroup n°3:

Exclusion from standards implementation (amoung the workgroup SAP and CompTIA did not agree to the following) : The procurement issue is aggravated by discrimination against OSS in the licensing conditions for some IT standards.

Over the past years it has become clear that specific patent licensing schemes, most importantly the so-called “RAND” 7 terms, discriminate against OSS implementation. This issue complicated the recent antitrust cases in Europe and was subject of a specific workshop on “IPR in ICT standardisation” 8 organised by DG Enterprise.

The workshop revealed a fundamental incompatibility of RAND models with OSS implementations, as well as a very controversial debate around this issue. From the perspective of OSS adoption,9 it could be said that RAND conditions fall short of the Common Patent Policy of ITU-T, ITU-R, ISO and IEC, which states that “a patent embodied fully or partly in a Recommendation | Deliverable must be accessible to everybody without undue constraints."

This calls forth the following howl from the ACT:

[THERE IS NO FUNDAMENTAL INCOMPATIBILITY. SEE FOOTNOTE 15]

The deleted passage continues:

Examples of such exclusions can be found in various areas. One of these areas are the MPEG standards in multimedia, where innovation has been dramatically reduced before the recent development of the Dirac codec by the BBC as OSS provided a high-quality modern alternative that is not patent encumbered.10 /

Unsubstantiated use of IPR threats . It is important that effective measures are implemented to protect the interests of both open source and proprietary software both as a software development and as a business model. Governments should ensure a level playing field for both software development models.

While we recognises the legitimate rights of intellectual property rights owners, we regret recent incidents of patent holders abuse and unsubstantiated use of their rights against open source/free software developers.

A recent development, which deserves the careful attention from the Commission, is the use of unsubstantiated threats of intellectual property rights infringements against those who attempt to develop interoperable software products. As an example, a major software company has publicly stated that it believes Linux and other open source software infringes 235 of its patents, but has never identified any of these patents.

Vague claims by patent holders that open source software may infringe their patent rights should be obliged to identify supposedly infringed patents or cease to make unsubstantiated allegations. This would prevent patents from being invoked to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt (“FUD”) against open source software products in the minds of both developers and users. The behaviour of creating FUD against open source software solutions should not be tolerated, as it amounts to an anticompetitive strategy aimed at distorting conditions in the marketplace to the detriment of OSS products.

Which provokes an even louder howl:

WE DISAGREE WITH SEVERAL POINTS IN THIS SECTION. THIS PAPER SHOULD NOT ENCROACH ON THE WORK OF WG 3, SO THE SECTION WOULD BEST BE DELETED.

As you might expect, 180 degree U-turns are also requested in the Actions section. So what starts out as:

In addition, it is fundamental to ensure that open source/free software developers and distributors enjoy adequate protection that allows them to implement standardised technologies protected by patents in a way compatible with open source/free software licenses.

Becomes:

According to some, in addition, it is fundamental to ensure that open source/free software developers and distributors enjoy adequate protection that allows them to implement standardised technologies protected by patents in a way compatible with open source/free software licenses.

plus its exact opposite:

Others believe the current standardisation environment is already technology neutral, and that standardisation should continue to be voluntary and market-led.

Others as in Microsoft and mates.

All-in-all, the modifications to the document provide a fascinating insight into how lobbyists operate in their attempt to neuter threats to their constituencies through the shameless evisceration and outright inversion of content. Fortunately, when the final strategy document comes out, we will be able to pinpoint exactly where ACT's agenda has been inserted. Of course, before then we need to make the above document as widely known as possible, so that the relevant people at the European Union are aware of what's going on, and maybe even take action to prevent this gross distortion of the paper's purpose.

and moving on past a video clip:

"That weekend Gates and Noorda met in the American Airlines Admirals Club lounge at San Francisco Airport. Gates barely took time to say hello before he reiterated his interest in a corporate marriage. “There was only one stipulation”, says Noorda, “Gates told me, that DRI thing has to go”. Ballmer confirms this, but says the reason was that it was clear to Microsoft that a merger with Novell would never get government approval if it included the purchase of Microsoft’s only MS-DOS competitor. But when Noorda raised the possibility that Washington might block a merger anyway, Gates replied, according to Noorda: 'Don’t worry, we know how to handle the Federal Government'"

Bill Gates was born to a wealthy family of diplomats and lawyers. The fragment above is intended to draw your attention to this fact (or remind you of it). Lobbying has become an incredibly worrisome phenomenon. In the United States alone there is multi-billion-dollar lobbying industry which does a lot of damage to the stability of the system. See this video below of Larry Lessig who discusses such severe issues which he calls “corruption”:

1. FCC-Comcast-Microsoft and the Freedom Antagonists Axis?
2. The Role of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) as Industry Observer (Updated)
3. The Fourth ‘Patent Deal’ was with Europe... and the Sixth Deal That Won’t be

In the past, the lobbying industry worked in the shadows, but newer disclosure rules revealed its extent and impact. As a contextually-related plug, consider the following set of eye-opening quotes.

There are video clips on that site that you should watch.

Even with the knowledge of this hi-jacking the EU commissioner in charge of the FOSS adoption in Europe was wined and dined by Ballmer and she subsequently adopted every change Zukerman (head of ACT, an MS front organization) sneaked into the document, thus crippling FOSS in Europe for the foreseeable future.

[bsniadajewski]

Re: Bill Gates hate Windows? Awesome.

Geez, GreyGeek, admit it. You hate Microsoft and anything to do with it with a purple passion.

[Tanner1294]

Re: Bill Gates hate Windows? Awesome.

Geez, GreyGeek, admit it. You hate Microsoft and anything to do with it with a purple passion.

Why not hate Microsoft? Then again, why not hate corporations in general? I'm not a hippy but I'm utterly disgusted with corporations nowadays, the only one that I still love is Apple but even they have some backdoor secrets that I'd rather not know.

Speaking of Microsoft's cherry picking, I learned about that with the release of KDE 4.(5? The one where Window Snapping was introduced.). I remember reading an article about how MS had stolen a piece of code and innovation from the KDE SC team, so they got their revenge by shoving out the Windows 7 Snap feature months before Windows 7 had even been released. I've yet to see this kind of thing to come from Apple but it may be on it's way with the OS 10.7's been talked about.
Everyone I've talked to and interviews I've read say that it's absolutely horrible and may very well be Apple's very own Windows Vista.

[Goeroeboeroe]

Re: Bill Gates hate Windows? Awesome.

Geez, GreyGeek, admit it. You hate Microsoft and anything to do with it with a purple passion.

It has nothing to do with hate 'just like that'. If you say GreyGeek hates Microsoft, I guess you'll say I hate it too. Maybe even more fanatic, because I write tutorials about building sites, and if there's one subject where Microsoft really did a lot of harm it's there. (I think. Probably somebody programming in C would say the same about another language.)

It has nothing to do with hate. Why do I not 'hate' IBM, another big company that also did some wrong things in the past? Because it never did the kind of bribing, blackmailing, destroying companies/people, etc., etc., on the scale Microsoft did.
Why do I hate Microsoft, apart from the ethical point? Because it has costed me (and lots of other people) personally lots of money and time. One simple, small example:
Yesterday I worked on a computer of a friend of me. He doesn't have Microsoft Office. I had to install LibreOffice because he gets attachments in doc-format. Why do I hate Microsoft? Because I have to install LibreOffice (or another program like that) on every computer to be able to read attachments, because people don't even know you can send text in another format then .doc. (The Netherlands is a country completely addicted to Microsoft.)

GreyGeek mentioned the software 'charity': I'll give you money, but you'll have to use Microsoft products. That's still happening. One of the new members of the European Union (don't remember which country, but it was one of the former Yugoslavian countries) gets a lot of software/hardware for universities etc. from Microsoft. One little condition: they have to drop their Linux servers etc.

It's not that I hate Microsoft. It's that I hate bribing, blackmailing, destroying each other companies instead of fair competition, destroying people. That's what I hate. And if that's the exact business model of a company, than it's impossible for me not to hate that company.
I don't hate everybody working for Microsoft. I hate the company. And I hate the topmanagers responsible for the policy of Microsoft. People like Gates. Can you give me one good reason why I shouldn't hate a briber, blackmailer, etc.?
(By the way: you use the word 'hate', so I use it too. Personally I would prefer to use the word 'dislike'. It's not that I can't sleep at night because I keep grinding my teeth thinking desperately 'I hate Gates, I hate Microsoft' , so I think 'hate' is a little too strong)

Edit: addes 'just like that' in the first sentence.

[bsniadajewski]

Re: Bill Gates hate Windows? Awesome.

@Goeroeboeroe

I guess "hate" is too strong a word. Sorry for word choice. I was going for "extremely dislike" more than anything. As for hating a person, I fell it's best to quote a well-known philosopher/religious treacher and say "love your enemy". I'm sure ardvark71 can back me up on this one, maybe. I know hGates has done all sorts of stuff, but I am not going to hate a guy. (love the sinner, hate the sin) (It's Sunday, I'll be off to Mass soon, so please excuse my use of religious quotes)

[Tanner1294]

Re: Bill Gates hate Windows? Awesome.

I still find it funny that one of the classic arguments between Apple Mac users and Windows users is "MS is gonna run Apple out of business!" and vice versa when in reality this will never happen. People still don't realize that Apple made an agreement with IBM back in the 80's that stated that neither Apple nor IBM would try and kill one another, and that if one of them was failing, the other company would help drive business towards them.
Probably the most famous agreement was when Steve Jobs announced in a Keynote at an Apple WWDC that they were 'partnering' with Microsoft. This is where the classic argument came from that Microsoft saved Apple because MS invested millions of dollars into Apple to keep it from bankrupting. That's not true. Apple had plenty of money and were nowhere near bankruptcy, the money MS invested was just that, an investment. After reading earlier posts in this Topic, I'd say they were cherry-picking again, but i also think Apple's too smart to let that happen

[Linkmaster]

Re: Bill Gates hate Windows? Awesome.

I'll concede my first statement, it was fairly brash, and not researched well.

I agree with a lot of GreyGeek says, mainly because I haven't seen him show something that isn't true yet, and he provides all the links necessary to his statements. I have seen a few of the things you mentioned[the cherrypicking, KDE copying, the changes in the FOSS document], so I know the validity is doubly true.

That being said, I don't hate Microsoft. I dislike quite a few of the things they do, but at the same time, they have done some good things[IMO of course]. I'm a fan of the XBox and the Zune, and though they run an embedded Windows[with hacking, you can get the Xbox to run linux, IIRC], it actually works, rather than the actual OS. That being said, I know that some of the 'deals' you can get are pretty sketchy, such as XBox Live; I haven't done it, but from what I see about others, once you get it, you need to keep getting it. Sort of like an addiction if you will. The other is the DRM trap of the Zune Marketplace. $15 a month, you get access to over 6million songs. But you have to keep paying that 15 dollars a month, else the music won't work anymore. The only songs that will keep working are the 10 'free' songs per month, that you can keep forever.

Though at the same time, Apple is about as bad. They don't do the obvious blackmail/bribe/extort that Microsoft does, but they do something I think is a little more evil. I've seen and heard about Apple getting FOSS software, and using it to create their little things on OS X, and then hermatically sealing it. I know that Microsoft does something similar, but they usually steal from Apple, rather then Linux. Apple usually steals from Linux, because Microsoft already steals from them, so they can't backwards steal as easily.

This is, of coure, opinion. If there are facts that state what I think is true, please show me. I'd rather be enlightened than ignorant

[bsniadajewski]

Re: Bill Gates hate Windows? Awesome.

I understand that OS X itself is (partly) based on FreeBSD; so yes Apple's flagship is somewhat a product of FOSS, but not of Linux.

One thing I like about GreyGeek: He makes a statement, he backs it up. Reading from him on what Microsoft (and Apple), I'll have to agree with him. MS, no doubt, is looking out for number one, and will do anything to stay on top. But, that's just the top guys (Ballmer, marketing, et al.). I'm sure the programmers working on Windows, IE, Office, etc., are working their backsides off to get their products as good as they can get it.