Who’s Gate?
Comment on Linus Torvalds and Bill Gates Meet for the First Time Ever
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 3 days agoIf it wasn’t them, it would have been other people. Computer science doesn’t rest on shoulder of a “Great Man”
What Torvalds did was inspire a like-minded community to come together and work toward a collective good. On a shoe-string budget they constantly threaten Gate’s empire.
Gate’s on the other hand chose to enclose the intellectual commons of computer science and sell them at a profit. He extracted a heavy toll on all sectors of human activity. And what did this heavy burden buy us ? Really NOT MUCH ! It squelched out collaboration and turned programming greedy, it delivered poor bloated software that barely worked and then stagnated for 20 years. It created a farm stall for us to live in, their innovation today is only explained as a series of indignities we will have to live with, because of platform dynamics we really, literally cannot escape the black hole that is windows for they have captured the commons and have made themselves unavoidable, like the Troll asking his toll.
merc@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
The Typo Monster, he comes out at night, mostly
merc@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Now you just need to slay the Apostrophe Monster.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Frankly I have to mention one thing - while BG was in MS, the Windows world was kinda fine. He left before even Windows 7. He left after Vista, and Vista wasn’t very good, but what’s important - MS didn’t only do evil.
I mean, yeah, not “fine” fine, but when you are saying “and then stagnated for 20 years”, Bill wasn’t in MS for most of those 20 years.
I agree that platform dynamics suck, but I also very well remember from my childhood that I wanted platforms. Everyone wanted platforms. Everyone wanted platforms like ICQ, not too opinionated and de-facto interoperable, or like Geocities, but people wanted platforms.
It was just plainly unavoidable. Everyone wanted webpages to be dynamic applications and everyone wanted platforms.
Yes, both are traps of evolution.
Say, dynamic pages I wanted would be more like embedded content in its own square, as it was with Flash. Just instead of Netscape plugin API and one proprietary environment it could involve a virtual machine for running cross-platform bytecode, or even just PostScript. Java applets were that idea, sort of (no sandboxing), as always Sun solved the hard problem perfectly, but forgot to invent a way for adoption. Maybe it could be allowed access to cut buffers and even the rest of the page. But that would be requested. This would prevent the web turning into something only Chrome can support.
Say, platforms I wanted would be more like standardized unified resources pooled. Storage resources and computing resources and notification servers and indexation servers for search, possibly partitioned to accommodate the sheer amount of data. Maybe similar to Usenet and NOSTR. With user application being the endpoint to mix those into a “social network” or some other platform. Universal application-agnostic servers, specific user applications.
But this is all in hindsight.
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
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