Bill Gates steps down as the Chairman of Microsoft on July 1st to transition to full time philanthropic efforts with the Gates Foundation. However, I wonder how effective Bill will be other than writing checks. You see Bill's never played well with others.

Bill Gates was interviewed by the BBC’s Money Programme...Reading between the lines, Gates is essentially confessing that he would not have progressed had he and Paul Allen not found the source code.

"Hear what Microsoft's chairman Bill Gates had to say during his last official visit to the UK before he 'retires' later this year. IT PRO attended the special event hosted by the Institute of Directors (IoD) and, after Gates had done his thing there was a Q&A session with the billionaire and industry figurehead." And also note how some of his answers match up rather nicely with F/OSS.

To pay so much attention to Bill Gates' retirement is missing the point. What really matters is not Gates, nor Microsoft, but the unethical system of restrictions that Microsoft, like many other software companies, imposes on its customers.

The United Nations' favouritism for Free software seems to have gotten Bill Gates intervening.

So apparently open source software really is communism. But übercapitalist Bill Gates can't really complain; the Vietnamese government cites a crackdown on illegal copies of Windows as one reason for the switch, and we all know Bill wants you to be assured of that Windows Genuine Advantage, right?

If you are Bill Gates or Linus Torvalds, it is totally understandable to have an ego the size of the biggest planet. The two has been known to make comments that will forever keep the geek pride alive. If you want proof, just read the following quotes from Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds, and be the judge of who has a bigger ego between them.

Bill Gates' Searete is looking to make money from natural disasters. IT HAS been a long time since we last wrote about Searete, which is Bill Gates'; very own patent-trolling firm [1, 2, 3]. As the Gates-backed Intellectual Ventures demonstrates, these sleeping giant trolls sooner or later go offensive and proceed to extortion.

In the troubled economy of Europe Bill Gates and Microsoft try to make the population more Redmond dependent and in the United States too the Gates Foundation shapes (changes) public library policies