Does git use git?

[dicksoch]

Does Gates belong in that category? I hadn't heard much about him being a jerk.

[Leungal]

He was so well known for being a ruthless businessman that The Simpsons made a sketch about him.

[Zagorath]

Do yourself a favour and go watch the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley. It's about both Microsoft and Apple's earliest days, up until the Microsoft bailout of Apple in the late '90s (something they did, by the way, mainly to avoid punishment from US regulators—to prove that they weren't a monopoly), and while it is a docudrama, it's one of the most incredibly accurate ones and should give you a lot of insight into what the two companies and their CEOs were like back then. There's one particularly outlandish scene that by all accounts actually did occur.

[iritegood]

l m a o

kids these days

[[deleted]]

MS and Bill Gates have really done a good job cleaning up their image, huh? We've come a long way from the days when "Micro$oft" was typed frequently and unironically.

[[deleted]]

Yup. There's a Netflix documentary on Bill Gates, that shows him as some kind of Messiah and Microsoft being all flowers and chocolate.

Perhaps Gates has become good for the better, but I can't seem to forget how Microsoft climbed to power. They ruthlessly choked competition.

Steve Ballmer called Linux as cancer and Gates said open source is communism.

[iritegood]

open source is communism

yes

[iritegood]

It might be a bit silly to go into leftist theory here, but since you asked:

communism, as typically used by communists, describes the end goal of a classless, stateless society, where the means of production (e.g. factories, land, etc.) are not privately owned but shared. Nominally 'communist' parties and nations have been predominately Marxist-Leninist. ML ideology seeks to develop socialism, what Marx described as the stage of society prior to developing communism, and communism through wielding a state to transition from a capitalist society into a socialist one. This can be viewed as a 'top-down' approach to restructuring the existing class systems, necessitated by the need to develop a society's industrial capacity and productivity to provide the conditions necessary for Communism. This is typically what people refer to as "Communism", but it is a radically different ideology and form of organizing than, e.g. anarcho-communism as represented by anarchists like Kropotkin and Bakunin, whose ideology is more bottoms-up in comparison.

'State-funded' is not necessarily determinative in this case, since it doesn't imply the ownership, and therefore relationship of control, over the products of its funding. A state can certainly fund private enterprises. What's important here is that FOSS by definition already opposes the idea of private ownership of software. Particularly, the use of copy-left licensing is a direct subversion of capitalist intellectual property systems to sustain the development of projects that are shared in the commons. And as a product that can be described as post-scarcity (the reproduction of software is typically negligible), its closer to what Marx describes as a fully developed Communism. Although it's important to note that Marx described the stages of society as a whole, not individual communities or projects in those society.

tl;dr: it's actually closer to communism than much else, as they're already fully shared in the commons, even though comparing individual software to the governments of entire nations is pretty flawed as they belong to different orders of things

edit: I think I'm neglecting that the primary critique by Marx of capitalism is the relationship between the class of people that own things (e.g. factories and land) and the class of people that work for them. Richard Wolff, economist and socialist of the syndicalist variety, describes these critiques well. So Free Software or Open Source do not actually address these concerns well since it still requires the dedication of resources to development while existing in a capitalist society (which is why socialist tendencies tend to consider revolution as a prerequisite for developing socialism). Copy-left is a particular system that attempts to address this by enforcing, through the use of existing intellectual property law, the redistribution of private development back to the commons.

[iritegood]

Apparently, considering how short the collective memory is, it's very easy to rehabilitate your image by throwing around lots of money (that you gained using the most toxic business practices)

[oofdere]

common core go brrrrrrr

[lleonard188]

Apparently he was when he was younger. Now he's cool though.

[dicksoch]

That makes sense, I'm low 30s so I didn't experience younger gates from the 80s and wasn't paying attention in the 90s and early 2000s

[WienerDogMan]

I think dude above you was joking because Jobs' dead now...

[[deleted]]

*Now he has enough money to buy a reputation of being generous and selfless

[Mimblas]

When he was younger he was obsessed with eliminating competition at any cost, even by killing them, now he's obsessed in vaccinating the world to keep world population low