On the other hand, Bill Gates and his wife provide a large amount of funding to charity - starting with this.

Firefox has plenty of updates too, it is just released more frequently and any auto-update is done in one go. There is a growing feel too that Firefox is feeling the strain of becoming so popular and starting to lose its way, but we shall have to see on that one.

Beddo I'm not sure wether Bill Gates is your hero or wether you're just a contrary person.
As for the Bill and Melinda foundation, I believe they once spent thousands of "other peoples money" learning deprived kids to play bridge. Now why didnt I think of that?
How much of his own fortune does he spend? And how much are donations from others?
Charity is never a bad thing, but some charities are better than others.
Microsoft Office 2003 = over £250 Yes I can see how charitable this guy is.
Netscape where are they now?
How many times has microsoft been in court for its outrageous business practices?

The truth is from my point of view, I hate any company that sets itself up as a monopoly and then uses any tactic available to protect that status.
It simply isnt good for the end user.

Its not their software I hate its their company policy!

No

He deservedly earns the money he does, i know my facts on bill gates and he has worked damn hard to get where he is, simple as that.

And if you let the people decide where to donate, i doubt it would equal the $600mill that he gives away every year.

Simple fact of the matter is, most people who slag him off are simply jealous.

That's so not accurate mate, they didn't set themselves up as a monopoly, back in the day, Microsoft had to fight off numerous competitors, the biggest of which was IMB, and by allowing them to sell machines with his software in it AND keep the rights to sell to others too, he broke through.

The climb of Microsfot is a long winded story, but well worth reading as you will find a lot of what you know is wrong.
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If your refering to me. I don't hate rich people.
I do hate a lot of so called "business ethics"

Not at all.
Microsoft has done a great deal of good and bad. They provide a stupendous amount of jobs and contribute a great deal to the economies of many companies. They have also brought computers to the masses, I mean even the various distributions of Linux today mostly are not suitable for plug and play dummies.
When talking about licensing costs, there are many things to factor in - just look at the likes of Adobe who charge way more for their packages.

As far as the charity goes, Wikipedia has a good article on it. Noteably that Bill Gates is currently phasing out his involvement with Microsoft to dedicate his time to charity work (expected to be done completely sometime in 2008)

The BBC quote from 2005 is that the Gates family have given over $7billion of their own money to various causes.

Netscape, well they spawned their browser development of into a separate entity - Mozilla. They provide funding for Mozilla to develop the Gecko engine and still produce a Netscape browser based on it.

I'm mainly pointing out that things aren't quite so simple as they appear. Firefox has its problems, Microsoft and Bill Gates have their good points too. It just annoys me when people harp on about the evils of Microsoft etc with complete irrelevance and disregard to everything else.

Firefox is safer and faster ! it is used by the top computer people due to the fact IE is targeted by hackers and even just browsing sites you can pick up things !

just use Ie for windows updates as firefox does not like it !

look at the add on's for firefox aswell it's just a top product !!