Bill Gates welcomed the world to a new breed of "kinder capitalism" at Davos this week. Conveniently forgetting his past, Mr. Gates declared:
"We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well."

Bill Gates steps down as the Chairman of Microsoft on July 1st to transition to full time philanthropic efforts with the Gates Foundation. However, I wonder how effective Bill will be other than writing checks. You see Bill's never played well with others.

"Hear what Microsoft's chairman Bill Gates had to say during his last official visit to the UK before he 'retires' later this year. IT PRO attended the special event hosted by the Institute of Directors (IoD) and, after Gates had done his thing there was a Q&A session with the billionaire and industry figurehead." And also note how some of his answers match up rather nicely with F/OSS.

Bill Gates was interviewed by the BBC’s Money Programme...Reading between the lines, Gates is essentially confessing that he would not have progressed had he and Paul Allen not found the source code.

The United Nations' favouritism for Free software seems to have gotten Bill Gates intervening.

Bill Gates' Searete is looking to make money from natural disasters. IT HAS been a long time since we last wrote about Searete, which is Bill Gates'; very own patent-trolling firm [1, 2, 3]. As the Gates-backed Intellectual Ventures demonstrates, these sleeping giant trolls sooner or later go offensive and proceed to extortion.

In the past week alone, Windows deals in Dubai, in Paris and even in Greece were announced not quite by Microsoft, but by Bill Gates, who had met politicians. We seem to recall press releases suggesting so — giving Gates all the credit. This was a not technical decision as much as a political one. Here is the latest news from Greece, which we have not covered yet (follow the links to find the rest).

Yes, Microsoft is demanding — and in many cases, receiving royalties — from companies selling devices that run Android, an operating system based on Linux. This shows that its place in the world remains complicated. Though it’s moving to the web, it is still very much a company that makes money selling software — and it still has an interest in protecting this business.

Microsoft's last-minute lobbying in the US on behalf of its Office Open XML document format included a visit by outgoing chairman Bill Gates to a US Congressional committee last week.