It often feels that to learn anything you have to let go of you in subtle way to be able to align with the world and take a deep accepting look at it. Only then you're enlightened. And yeah it feels a lot like compassion or love.
TLDR: View the videos on youtube and not on microsoft website
For a moment i too thought the same, but it got spoiled soon. To view the videos you need to have sliver light and it takes a long time for just the page to download. Why cant it be just a downloadble file.
The gifts Bill Gates gives always come with a little string attached. In recent years his propaganda became strong enough that most people don't see that anymore.
Name a known public good or act of charity that didn't have any strings attached. I doubt that you can.
In the case of all of his gifts coming with strings, which would clearly include his charitable work - if he didn't attach strings to eg the $150+ billion he's going to give away, it'd be a disaster. The same is true for essentially all philanthropy. If you want to make sure charitable efforts are not wasted, strings are inherently necessary.
In this case, it would have enabled wider availability if it hadn't been stuck under silverlight, however you're free to reject the gift. At worst it's a very mild inconvenience in exchange for something that's very valuable, and people here are reacting wildly out of proportion to the issue.
Putting strings on your gift to ensure it'll be put to good use is one thing. Now, putting strings on it to ensure you'll get more money from people using your "gift", and then insist on calling it a gift, that's an entirely different thing.
YT can delete them at any moment if some complaint comes, unless it's published by the legal owner. And Gates, who apparently bought the rights, decided to publish it only on his site and that was the only place for some years.
To be fair, until recently Netflix/Amazon etc used Silverlight, Microsoft could hardly elect to use some other video technology while they were pushing SL.
No, it's not fair. The purpose of Netflix is to earn money from the viewers. Silverlight was used only for DRM.
The claimed purpose of Gates' project was "to make the material freely available" for all learners as a gift (1). He didn't have to use DRM for that if he really bought the rights. As it was executed (Silverlight was never popular, only Netflix users had to install it) it appeared as just an advertising campaign for Silverlight.
Note that research.microsoft.com otherwise never had to follow the commercial limitations of the rest of Microsoft, regularly publishing PDFs (duh, research) or using other non-Microsoft technologies at the time they were "verboten" on other Microsoft sites.
Apparently, they "enhanced" the lectures with comments. These comments are also to be forever lost, remaining locked in in the limiting technology instead of being published in any common format like HTML or PDF.
"Microsoft Research, in collaboration with Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates, today launched a Web site that makes an acclaimed lecture series by the iconic physicist Richard Feynman freely available to the general public for the first time. The lectures, which Feynman originally delivered at Cornell University in 1964, have been hugely influential for many people, including Gates. Gates privately purchased the rights to the seven lectures in the series, called “The Character of Physical Law,” to make them widely available to the public for free with the hope that they will help get kids excited about physics and science."
Or, even more probably, won't help, if the DRM is also used. Then you need to reverse engineer the DRM too. DRM was the main reason for the Silverlight use. Which can even better explain why nobody is interested in making the downloader or muxer, especially after Microsoft stopped developing Silverlight in 2013(!)
Pardon me for not tripping over myself to thank Gates for liberating the Feynman Lectures by locking them up in an encumbered proprietary format for his company's own benefit.
We can say what we want about copyright law, but at least copyright is based on the idea that the protected material will eventually become accessible in the public domain. DRM offers us no such bargain.
I don't know why you are being downvoted. Releasing something for free should not be an excuse to use DRM and to push one's platform. Such videos could have been made available through other means.
You don't have to thank him, it just doesn't make sense to complain. As far as I understand, you have more access to those lectures than you did before, even if you have to deal with Silverlight.
Not to take anything away from what Gates did (and I admire his post-Microsoft goals), it's probably mush easier to do this with your assets when they are as large as his.
The opposite, I think. People with that much money mostly fold in on themselves and spend all of their time managing the money for their own benefit (or even as a compulsion for its own sake).
The money was irrelevant, just as you think, but Bill spent his precious attention to give us Feynman instead of the nearly limitless other opportunities that money gave him. That rocks.
I didn't like his business practices. I very much like his philanthropy. One doesn't "cancel out" the other or any of that nonsense. They plot on different axis.
"People with that much money mostly fold in on themselves and spend all of their time managing the money for their own benefit (or even as a compulsion for its own sake)."
Do you have any source for that? That doesn't fit a lot of very famous billionaires, at least.
Well isn`t this some sort of selection bias going on here? To draw your conclusion, I would think you are talking about the louder, more visible types of billionaires.
Not necessarily a randomly selected subset of billionaires.
Really? I thought giving to charity was a fairly common and widespread practice around the world.
If you're looking for ideas on where your money could make a difference, think about open source projects you use regularly, local food banks, EFF, Amnesty International, or check out the Awesome Foundation!
And if you need help rationalizing it to yourself, consider that you could make a concrete, tear-inducing (positive) difference in somebody's life for the cost of a dinner at a decent restaurant or an Xbox game.
Try going to a public library and checking out books without a library card (which almost always cost money). Therefore under your premise public libraries are not for the common good because they have numerous use stipulations that go with them and they inherently restrict usage via fees.
This just floored me. I hope that some day I will acquire the generosity and perspective to use a small part of my assets for something like this.