Microsoft Has Now Open-Source Their BASIC Code From 1983

[zyxxel]

Bill now obviously feels differently. Otherwise he would be making those poorer countries pay for their anti-malarial drugs. Whether this is merely to "buy" his way into what he perceives as heaven, I'm not sure. I don't know how religious he is.

It is just a shame he realized after it was too late after he held back the computing industry with such a childish "mine, mine, mine!" mentality.

Oh well, humans aren't perfect; that's why I ignore most of them and do what feels right instead.

Just to be clear. Bill might have changed. Microsoft however is still an absolute parasite of the human race. There are no personal goals there; just a machine that operates to take as much as possible.

No, Bill Gates did not held back the computing industry. That statement indicates that you have missed quite a lot of what has happened around the world. It wasn't by holding back the computing industry that the world has been running M$ Windows for quite a number of years. Or MS-DOS before. And it wasn't by holding back the computing industry, that people have used Excel and Word documents as the standard to use for a huge number of years.

It wasn't like there were no competition - but the world didn't want to be held back by the competition since the world decided that it was worth paying to go the M$ route.

See how many years you have been able to run Linux for free - but for the majority of time, the large application base on Windows have been the preferred choice for a huge percent of companies and home users. They haven't wanted to be held back by the free offerings on Linux...

[shmerl]

No, Bill Gates did not held back the computing industry.

He just locked it up like crazy with MS shenanigans. That did slow progress down.

[zyxxel]

He just locked it up like crazy with MS shenanigans. That did slow progress down.

No, he created an infrastructure that resulted in millions of software developers having a market for their products. And an environment where the user could run all different programs on their single computer.

Life was fuck to have a Linux machine, an OS/2 machine, a Windows machine, ... and have to jump between them depending on what program to run.

[shmerl]

Whitewashing MS junk behavior? Not even funny.

[zyxxel]

Whitewashing MS junk behavior? Not even funny.

Wrong. It's the customers who are the fools if they want to be locked in. But blaming that on M$ is a serious flaw in your reasoning.

End result is still that Linux have had to spend a huge number of years to compete. Which isn't just because M$ is blocking the progress - M$ has also been delivering what people have wanted to have.

[Peninsula]

Nice, now I have something to work on.