Redemption (II)

I posted about redemption - and a rather partial forgiveness too - in my previous post "Redemption".  A couple of tweets on the back of that post have made me think again; at least, in relation to the second half of the post on the subject of the erstwhile software businessman, and now - perhaps - self-redeeming philanthropist, Bill Gates.

Deborah, from the excellent World Development Movement, has these two points to make.  Firstly, that:

@eiohel it's not just a matter of how Gates acquired his fortune but that 1 man has the power to decide how to solve the world's problems

To continue with:

@eiohel and his version is top down technocratic favouring his cronies in pharmaceutical and agribusiness companies

It does, therefore, lead one to wonder - maybe a little uncharitably - that Gates the philanthropist, wrapped up in that mindset of excluding copyright and IP laws and legislation - a mindset which has served to make him so much money in the software publishing and development businesses - is now quite naturally setting up the ground rules for branded medicine and crops the world over.

It is only human to favour those who think as one also thinks.  That he may believe in massive technological solutions - implemented by pyramidal organisations where one or two men (or very occasionally women) are paid enormous amounts of money to take relatively dictatorial decisions - is hardly surprising in the circumstances.  But as I pointed out in reply to the first of Deborah's tweets above:

@DeborahDoaneWDM Yes. That's absolutely the problem. Excellent point. For where one man can decide for better, one man can decide for worse.

And so it is we come back to the paradox of devolved governance and democracy in general: one highly driven man can do so much more and so very much more quickly.  But once the tools and structures are in place for this to happen for the wider good, those who would wish to abuse for their own advancement may do so far more easily.

And in a sense, as the BBC did indicate on Wednesday, Gates hasn't changed from his Microsoft days:

His foundation's work is carried out with a "hard-nosed mathematical" approach, he says, calculating the impact in terms of "dollars per year of life saved".

He is applying the same attention to detail that made him such a business success into the business of saving lives.

Substitute "dollars per year of life saved" with "dollars per year of sales bonus achieved at the expense of sustainable, safe, cost-effective and user-controllable software" and you might get a flavour of what I'm getting at. 

All those shady agreements to load only Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player on new computers or the decisions which made it impossible to open new Word documents with older versions of the same software are simply a few reminders of how empires are built.

So Deborah is right to take me to task.  And I'm glad she did.  I'm glad she did.