Commons Magazine
Not to be outdone, Mark Zuckerberg throws in $12 billion
March 29, 2011 | by Peaches O'Day
APRIL 1, 2011—Bill Gates shocked the world Wednesday by announcing that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation would grant $10 billion dollars to launch a new global institute promoting open source research in a variety of fields, including computer software where Gates made a fortune from Microsoft’s proprietary products. Even more surprising, the new project will be called the Richard Stallman Institute, honoring a controversial icon of the Open Source movementt.
Within hours, Steven Jobs of Apple announced he would launch a $10.1 billion open source initiative, which has yet to be named. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google, announced Thursday morning that they would each donate $5.1. billion to Gates’ project if it would be renamed the G-Stallman Institute. And by noon the same day, Mark Zuckerberg threw a hasty press conference to debut his new $12 billion Sharebook Open Source Mega-Institute.
And word is out that George Soros will soon announce a $14 billion dollar institute to promote the Tobin Tax, a small fee on currency transactions proposed by Nobel Economics Laureate James Tobin.
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When these people want
When these people want something they would do anything to get it! I think that what they are trying to do is great, but still, billions of dollars? Here’s the perfect picture of how our society works nowadays. People who could actually make some changes (globally) put such big prices on dispensable things. I support technology development, and all the improvements they are trying to make. There are big companies taking care of that; they come up with software to make all kinds of devices work, clean registry programs to keep the systems functional and so on. Maybe people who have the possibility should do bit more than paying $5.1 billion to change a letter in a name. Why not sparing $50 million to fix the world hunger problem?