[Lancaster] [Fwd: The story of Bill, Steve, Linus and co.]

[mp]

Ken Hough wrote:
> Andy,
> 
> This sounds good if you read as a rap, and so true!

Hehe, well, Stallman wouldn't like that they missed GNU.

> Except that Bill has got out of it. It seems that he saw the writing on the 
> wall!

He is still counting the cash as chairman of the evil empire, though -
and doing his best to support the expansion of intellectual property
rights on a global scale by handing out little bits of strategically
placed, highly overpriced medicine whenever there is a tendency of the
inhumane exploitation of Big Pharma to go too far and people get up in arms.

When a few years back African nations, NGOs and social movements put
focus on the issue and there was a lot of media attention world wide,
including high profile court cases, which was translating into a
critique of the global IPR system (as founded by characters like Edmund
Pratt of Pfizer and Gates himself and instituted as "global law" in the
WTO TRIPs Agreement), then suddenly, as from out of the blue, the global
media apparatus is full of the great news that the saviours of the
world, Bill and Melinda (with their foundation that is probably
primarily a tax evasion scheme), would provide medicine for the poor
Africans.

But would they now?

No, of course not, they would buy overpriced medicine from their
unjustly IPR-rich friends in the pharmaceutical industry and dump it
here and there in the developing world - so that no one would think that
there was a problem with the whole system. Nothing has changed, except
the public went one step further into the abyss of stupefication.

The perfect scam.
mp