Gates Foundation’s ‘dirty secret’
p2pnet.net news view:- An article by Charles Piller, Edmund Sanders and Robyn Dixon, LA Times Staff Writers includes this:
In a contradiction between its grants and its endowment holdings, a Times investigation has found, the foundation reaps vast financial gains every year from investments that contravene its good works.
But they only touched the surface of some of the PTC issues, such as their investments in “Pharmaceutical companies that price drugs beyond the reach of AIDS patients the foundation is trying to treat”.
Some critics say the foundation’s failure to use its own investments “to promote … public benefit in developing countries at reasonable cost” might trace back to the source of most of its money – Microsoft – which Bill Gates serves as chairman.
Microsoft monopolies in computer operating systems and business software depend upon the same intellectual-property and trade-law approaches favored by drug companies.
Mr Gates personal ideological view is that knowledge should be treated as property, and that the owners should always seek monopoly-rents (royalties) and he’s said to direct the Gates foundation to mirror this ideology, harming the very people he is trying to help.
Key areas such as scientific, medical and educational materials are increasingly moving to “Open Access”, “Peer Distribution” and sometimes “Peer Production” methods which focus on the fixed costs of development and distribution of knowledge and allow the marginal cost to be zero (IE: do not charge monopoly-rents on intellectual “property”).
In my ideal world, we could turn Gates ideology into honest philanthropy, but I’m skeptical that a man who became the richest man on the planet via societal misinformation around the nature of knowledge is going to turn around any time soon.
See also: Richest man in the world still admired, even if he believes the world is flat.
Russell McOrmond – p2pnet contributing editor
[McOrmond is an independent author (software and non-software) who uses modern business models and licensing (Free/Libre and Open Source Software, Creative Commons). He's also the CLUE policy coordinator.]
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January 8th, 2007 at 9:56 pm
Yes indeed. Cut the funds provided to the world’s poor by half — but have those funds provided through investments where profit isn’t a goal and products developed are given away. The poor will be so much better feeling the help they get comes from such noble sources instead of money-grubbing pay-me-for-my-work selfish companies.
January 8th, 2007 at 10:18 pm
The article in the LA Times is a huge eye-opener.
Thanks Russell for getting it to us, and for your excellent summary.
Thanks Jon for providing the avenue for us to read about this.
You are doing the public a service.
January 9th, 2007 at 2:29 am
Don’t you know Gates is God? How dare you !!!!!!!!