It appears that during the Coronavirus lock-down, the Linux market share according to website NetMarketShare has seen quite a large bump.
While calculating the market share of a desktop operating system is never going to be exactly correct, sites like NetMarketShare are one of the best ways to look at it. According to their stats the Linux share has bumped between around 1.5% and 2% for some time. That changed when they recently put up April's stats, which shows the Linux market overall according to them at 2.87%.
The biggest winner appears to be Ubuntu when looking over what Linux versions they track. Ubuntu alone seemed to go from 0.27% in March up to 1.89% in April.
What would be the cause of such a bump? Well, entirely possible it's due to more people using Linux personally at home where they would perhaps be using Windows workstations in their job. Really we could speculate forever on this - so over to you, what do you think?
Nothing to go popping open the champagne over though, while it's a big jump it would only truly be worth celebrating if it sustains the higher position. At least when looking over the Steam numbers too (see our Steam Tracker), we're trending upwards there.
Quoting: Cyba.CowboyMaybe I'm missing something, but I don't see what the problem is with the first link and although I only skimmed the rest of the links, the general argument seems to be a disagreement with the direction and / or priorities of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation... That's not really doing anything sinister, disturbing or immoral.That's why I said "problematic" rather than "sinister" or "immoral".
There's certainly a range of interpretations you can put on Gates' actions. You can say he's acting out of genuine conviction that his approach/es are the right ones. Probably to a good extent he is . . . people often convince themselves that the approach which is good for them is the right one.
But consider. You have a guy with tens of billions of dollars, on which he would normally pay tax. He shelters that money from tax in a charitable trust. He invests that money in profitable endeavours; the capital gains made would, again, normally be taxed, but because it is a charity they are not.
He then uses the untaxed money both to donate and to lobby. He donates money to things such as education . . . money that might have been available for the democratically elected government to spend on education had he not sheltered it from taxation in the first place. In doing so, he shapes the way education is delivered. So he is substituting the priorities of the public with his own private priorities--and in setting the agenda, he shifts public money to being spent on what his private money was donated towards. Even if his priorities are good ones, by what right does he hijack public policy?
Getting more specific, the policies he pushes are self-dealing ones, which increase the profits of the very firms his funds are invested in. This helps the fund grow . . . lather, rinse and repeat. You could say, doing well by doing good. But what are the opportunity costs? Now there you get into opinion, certainly.
QuoteWhat direction should the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation be moving in, and what should their priorities be?
Well if I asked that here, I'd probably get a dozen or more different answers... Each answer would be based exclusively on what that individual Community Member thinks is the right direction to move in or are priorities in the world.
The fact that other people may have other opinions on what policy is best is not a reason for me to stop having opinions. I have an opinion about the earth being on the round-ish side despite my knowledge that there are people who hold the opinion that it's flat. I have an opinion about the Third Reich being a bad thing; the existence of neo-Nazis who disagree does not sway me.
But if you do want to say that all opinions are purely subjective, then Bill and Melinda Gates are just spending money at random and there's nothing either good or bad about it. I prefer to think that it's possible to evaluate policies. So for instance, we have a pandemic right now. Some policies will result in more people dying than other policies. I think that matters.
But in the normal day in, day out, year in, year out workings of governments and societies, some policies will still result in more people dying. At some point the rubber meets the road and people's opinions result in life or death. Some countries have higher incidences of disease, death in childbirth, and so on. Some countries have shorter average lifespans. There is a lot of research on what can be done to improve public health, what is cost effective and what is not. Far as I can tell, while few may be willing to bite the hand that feeds them, when the research isn't about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation but is on the general question of what measures are good for public health, experts rarely say that the way to go is to spend most of your public health money on patented pharmaceuticals at monopoly prices.
Gates is of course a big supporter of intellectual property; his beliefs about software extend naturally to other areas like drugs. The Gates foundation lobbies for IP as a string on its donations. But in the case of pharmaceuticals, intellectual property is a life and death issue, particularly in the third world where they cannot afford the jacked up prices.
So yeah, in my opinion, if you push a third world country's priorities away from low-tech public health measures, and get it to back off on generic drugs, instead using its health care money to buy the expensive drugs your donation was the gateway for, that is going to result in a bunch more real people dying. And in my opinion, that's not particularly good.
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