image transcription:
big collage of people captioned, “the only people I wouldn’t have minded being billionaires”
names(and a bit of info, which is not included in the collage) of people in collage(from top left, row-wise):
- Alexandra Elbakyan, creator of Sci-Hub. perhaps the single-most important person in the scientific community regarding access to research papers.
- Linus Torvalds, creator of linux kernel and git, courtesy of which we have GNU/Linux.
- David Revoy, french artist famous for his pepper&carrot, a libre webcomic. inspiration for artists who are into free software movement
- Richard Stallman, arch-hacker who started it all. founded the GNU project, free software movement, Emacs, GCC, GPL, concept of copyleft, among many other things. champions for free software to this day(is undergoing treatment for cancer at the moment).
- Jean-Baptiste Kempf, president of VLC media player for 2 decades now
- Ian Murdock, founder of Debian GNU/Linux and Debian manifesto. died too soon.
- Alexis Kauffmann, creator of framasoft, a French nonprofit organisation that champions free software. known for providing alternatives to centralised services, notable one being framapad and peertube.
- Aaron Swartz, a brilliant programmer who created RSS, markdown, creative commons, and is known for his involvement in creation of reddit. he also died too soon.
- Bram Moolenaar, creator of vim, a charityware.
on the bottom right is the text reading, “plus the thousands of free software enthusiasts working tirelessly.”
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It’s nice to appreciate people who do good things, but keep in mind that the only way people become billionaires is by exploiting people. So I would not want any of these people to be billionaires because it would mean they got that wealth not by doing good things, but by owning ridiculous amounts of capital and exploiting people.
Rant over, sorry.
it’s alright mate. your rant helped me see things in a different light. so thank you.
God no. Billionaires are super unethical, they should not exist period. Go ask the people on your list what they have to say, about half of them will probably agree with me.
You need to be a horrible person to become a billionaire.
Not necessarily. Ugur Sahin, one of the founders of Biontech, became a billionaire because of his covid vaccine.
This guy (and his wife) spent years working on cancer drugs using that technology and when covid hit, they saw the potential and put all their mRNA eggs into one basket. And it worked.
These guys saved literally millions of lives and they absolutely deserve to be filthy rich.
Fun fact: Biontechs address is literally “at the goldmine” (an der Goldgrube).
To be fair, some, like Linus, are already millionaires (Linus has a net worth of 150 million, for example). Without exploiting or anything. In Linus’ case by being gifted stocks of the company he basically allowed to be created, Red Hat.
Not enough people know of and appreciate Alexandra Elbakyan. Her contribution to science is immeasurable.
