Gates and Censorship

[JamieBeeston]

los angeles said:

It's been reported Bill Gates has submitted to the will of the Chinese government by omitting certain officially taboo words from his Microsoft dictionary. Was he right or wrong to do this?

His shareholders will say yes

Business is business.

Remove 'freedom' and 'liberty' and earn £xbn

Dont, and be removed from CEO

[randlemarcus]

But he did this years ago, when removing some offensive symbols from one of the wingding type fonts.

Its a stark and simple choice out there. Either the Chinese use Red Flag Linux, and MS dont get any money, or they remove some offensive words from a dictionary(and its sooooooo difficult to add to dictionary if it bothers you) and sell a few copies to the Chinese governement, thus encouraging the use of the computer and access to (quite tramelled) information.

Besides, if the little devils dont know how to spell by now...

[_dobbo_]

You could argue that by supplying Microsoft products to china Gates is actually empowering the populace buy providing them with access to information previously unavailable.

This seems a fair trade off against words in a dictionary! Could Bill Gates be the father of the revolution in China?

[__Lee__]

_dobbo_ said:

You could argue that by supplying Microsoft products to china Gates is actually empowering the populace buy providing them with access to information previously unavailable. This seems a fair trade off against words in a dictionary! Could Bill Gates be the father of the revolution in China?

Interesting fact: 82% of Windows machines in China are running pirate copies.

LongHorn is supposed to cure this though with sophisticated anti-piracy defences.

[_dobbo_]

los angeles said:

_dobbo_ said: You could argue that by supplying Microsoft products to china Gates is actually empowering the populace buy providing them with access to information previously unavailable. This seems a fair trade off against words in a dictionary! Could Bill Gates be the father of the revolution in China? Not if the word, "revolution," is deleted.

indeed! You could argue that but lets face it, probably wouldn't!