|~|bonobillbody.jpg|~|U2 frontman Bono and Microsoft boss Bill Gates have jointly been named ‘Man of The Year’ by US publication Time Magazine.|~|Christmas, as a holiday, is celebrated by many communities, not just Christian ones, as those of us lucky enough to live in the Middle East know full well.
It is also, of course, very much a time for giving — a period when our thoughts should turn to others less fortunate than ourselves.
With that in mind, perhaps all of us in the IT community should raise a cheer for the individual whom prestigious publication Time magazine has heralded as its “Man of the Year” for his tireless contributions to charity in 2005: Bono.
Oh, OK, the Irish rock star did have to share his award with some other chap, some bloke called Bill Gates, and his wife.
While Bono just hung around with George Bush and other world leaders (while writing the odd song or two) to get his recognition, William Gates III, Microsoft’s esteemed chairman and chief software architect, has won his for giving away more money at a faster rate than anyone else in history.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the world’s largest such charitable foundation, according to Time. It is valued at more than US$29 billion and spends almost as much as the World Health Organisation (WHO) each year, the magazine said.
It credits the Foundation with saving at least 700,000 people by investing in vaccination programmes around the world, and, Time also pointed out, it has donated computers and internet access to 11,000 libraries across the world, while sponsoring the biggest scholarship fund in history.
If all that doesn’t sound impressive enough, former US president Jimmy Carter (himself celebrated for his charitable works) has described it as “the most important organisation in the world,” and Time has celebrated Gates as “being shrewd about doing good, for rewiring politics and re-engineering justice and then daring the rest of the world to follow. Heady stuff indeed.
Of course, Gates wouldn’t be in the position of being able to give away more money than anybody else in history if he hadn’t become one of the richest men the world has ever seen.
His fortune is based on the success of a previous Time magazine Man of the Year winner: the PC itself, which won the accolade in 1982.
The successful development of the PC (not to mention the shrewdness on Gates’ part to recognise that success) over the past 20 years or so has effectively reshaped the world and created opportunities for millions of people. Where would we be today without the internet, or without the world wide web.
The facts for this piece were sourced on Google, a web site that only exists today because of Gates’ work. Although on second thought, that’s one piece of generosity he might regret…
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