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Beginnings Of The Free Software Debate In 1975
Private Essayist writes: "This article in the NY Times (free reg., etc.) tells about an ongoing mystery over who stole a copy of Altair Basic written by Bill Gates in 1975. More important, however, the article shows the beginnings of the debate over the concept of whether or not software should be free. The Homebrew Computer Club members interviewed in this article talk about the debate they had over this issue way back then. It's interesting to read."
Buy a copy of the new edition of "Fire In The Valley" by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine, which reprints the letter from Bill to the Homebrewers, and is also one hell of a book (even if it does make the occasional mistake). Along with "Hackers", it's required reading for Personal Computer History 101.
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
By William Henry Gates III
February 3, 1976
An Open Letter to Hobbyists
To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted. Will quality software be written for the hobby market?
Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.
The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.
Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.
What about the guys who re-sell Altair BASIC, aren't they making money on hobby software? Yes, but those who have been reported to us may lose in the end. They are the ones who give hobbyists a bad name, and should be kicked out of any club meeting they show up at.
I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up, or has a suggestion or comment. Just write to me at 1180 Alvarado SE, #114, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software. Bill Gates General Partner, Micro-Soft
AN OPEN LETTER TO HOBBYISTS
By William Henry Gates III
February 3, 1976
An Open Letter to Hobbyists
To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted. Will quality software be written for the hobby market?
Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.
The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.
Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.
What about the guys who re-sell Altair BASIC, aren't they making money on hobby software? Yes, but those who have been reported to us may lose in the end. They are the ones who give hobbyists a bad name, and should be kicked out of any club meeting they show up at.
I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up, or has a suggestion or comment. Just write to me at 1180 Alvarado SE, #114, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software.
Bill Gates
General Partner, Micro-Soft
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
I was 12 years old. I had just been introduced to computers. The first language I had been taught was BASIC at the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley, CA. Eventually a microcomputer store opened in my home town called The Byte Shop, where I started annoying the sales people by fiddling with their SOL-20s and Apples, writing little ditties in BASIC. I got to know BASIC real well. I got to know several dialects of BASIC, and could intelligently discuss the relative merits of each.
With all that hands-on experience, I can say without fear of contradiction: Microsoft BASIC was one of the worst BASIC interpreters available. The only one I can think of off-hand that was even worse was Northstar BASIC.
I settled in to a happy relationship with a variant called Extended Cassette BASIC, published by Processor Technology for the SOL-20. This BASIC (back in 1978, mind), had:
Microsoft, in typical form, took another ten years to get as far, and consumed ten times as much memory doing it.
I really should drag out my old SOL-20 and do some side-by-side comparisons of Microsoft's old stuff.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Otherwise, for every cabinet the carpenter makes, he would charge exactly the same amount as that weight of logs would cost from the lumbar yard. Oh, wait, why should the lumbar yard charge for logs when they're just GROWING for free all around? And minerals are underground, everywhere. We have cows wandering the fields. Why do we have to pay for ANYTHING AT ALL?
This idea that only possesions have any value is an utterly materialistic concept, and it won't do at all in an information-based society. Money is to pay for people's time and effort, not for the raw materials they used.
--
It's a
-- Danny Vermin
The debate was not whether software should be free (gratis or otherwise), but whether people have the right to violate the copyright of another, in this case, billy's interpreter. If one receives holy heck for calling such an action "piracy", then let's keep our standards equal and not equate the free software to warez. The only reason copyright protects the GPL is because it also protects Billy Boy. Selective applications of law and/or morality is the antithesis of freedom...
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
AtariBASIC was bad, as was Northstar BASIC you mention, actually I want to call it Zbasic which might be what the .COM file was called on my floppy.
f
I was most familiar with MS-BASIC version 5.21 which came bundled with my father's Morrow MD-2 back in 1982. Similar versions also shipped with the Osborne and Kaypro as I recall.
Now if you are thinking of Microsoft BASIC as being similar to that which shipped with the Apple as Applesoft, or the one in the Commodore PET, I can understand your comments.
I have never seen a SOL-20, or this extended cassette BASIC, but you are in luck... The manual is online:
http://www.thebattles.net/sol20/extcassbasic.pd
Looking it over it really seems to be very close to the Microsoft BASIC I remember. String and file handling isn't as advanced as I recall, but the ability to work with matrices is rather nice.
I don't see exactly what you mean by multi-line user-defined functions, all that is implemented was GOSUB which was available in MS-BASIC 5.21.
Certainly impressive for 1977, but I think I'd be hard pressed to backup the statement that it took 10 years for Microsoft to get that far, and ten times as much memory doing it.
MS-BASIC 5.21 ran on a machine with 64K of RAM. 57K was available after loading CP/M 2.2, and one had about 35K after loading up MS-BASIC, 39K free if you didn't load the Random access file support.
But by 1982 floppy drives were common place, which allowed for techniques such as random access files, so it's understandable it used a few more K.
I think you are thinking of QuickBASIC as being 10 years later and 10 times the memory. But there were many generations of MS-BASIC between 1977 and QuickBASIC.
Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted.
Corollary: until Windows is past history, a lot of hobby computers are being wasted.
Will quality software be written for the hobby market?
It certainly has been, but not by Micro-Soft! (-:
The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.
And all that time was paid for?
Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC.
This statement makes me curous, Bill. If it only took you two months to write the entire BASIC, why did it take a whole year to tinker with it? Can I ask you a question and get an honest answer? Did ``write'' here mean ``key in from a listing stolen from University rubbish bins?''
People complained that Altair BASIC was buggy. Is that because the bugs were keyed in from a discarded program listing, or because your programming skills were as good as your soldering skills?
The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive.
Nothing's changed much since. According to you, Bill, as recently as 1998 Microsoft's customer feedback was almost entirely positive. Since the whole world's wrong, and you're right, and that's the way it's always been, who am I to argue? Uh, it might helped if you upped the dosage of those pills, Bill.
As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software.
And you don't? Naturally, those listings taken from the dumpsters were public domain, weren't they? I mean, the authors haven't complained yet, have they? The Spyglass issue was just a little misunderstanding? How about the drive doubler software? And, my gosh, doesn't Money resemble something Microsoft once had a look at the source code for awfully closely? Come clean, Bill, tell us the whole story!
What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?
Linus Torvalds.
Next question? (-:
I would appreciate letters from any one who [...] has a suggestion or comment.
Ever your humble servant. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
the article shows the beginnings of the debate over the concept of whether or not software should be free.
It goes back WAY farther than that...
The earliest piece I'm aware of is an article in Communications of the ACM by Bernie Galler. In it he complained that the price being charged for a piece of software (I think it was $75) was greater than the cost of duplicating the card deck and mailing it. He warned that this could lead to the concept of software as a product, programming as a profession, and trade secret restrictions impeeding the free flow of software technology development.
I don't recall the exact date of the article. But it was in the same issue as Djikstra's "GOTO Considered Harmful" article which was the origin of the whole "structured programming" flap, and structured programming was well developed and in vogue by the end of the 1960s.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I mean that question seriously, the answer to it is the future, not some future where everything is free (at least, not yet).
It's evolved from a system where consumers are individuals. You can sell individuals a book, a CD, a T-shirt, so the current model is evolved from that.
Thing is, it doesn't cost $15 to make a music CD. Ignoring the legalized embezzelment that the music industry is engaged in, it costs at least $20,000 to record even a lamely-produced album, and then you can't print 1 CD and 1 inlay sheet, you have to print 1000 CDs and 1000 inlay sheets. Then you add the time it took the band to (if you're fair) write the songs, rehearse them and record them - a year's salary for 4 people. Say, $120,000. So you have to invest, say, $143,000 to make 1000 CDs. The next 1000 only cost $3,000 though, so you hope you sell more than 1,000. If you think you'll sell 10,000 you can price the CD at around $15 and break even. If you think you'll sell 1,000 then your price is $150 per CD and that's too much (some technical books cost something approaching this figure, for this reason).
It's the same with software - but worse. Teams are generally bigger than bands, and they expect a higher salary, being "skilled" workers. Your software might additionally take two years or more to write. Let's say 6 programmers on $60,000 for 2 years - that's a whopping $720,000. If the software's "value" is $40 (i.e. people would pay $40 for it) then you need to sell 18,000 copies. Mind you, if you knew you could sell 180,000 copies you could charge everyone $4, and if you knew you could sell 1,800,000 then it's just 40c each (I'm now ignoring cost-of-materials completely - the internet economy has no need for printed manuals and CDs, although I wish Intel did printed PIII manuals ;).
Now, most items are of marginal popularity. That is, the company works out beforehand how big the market is for the product. It then calculates how much the product costs to develop. It then calculates the market price for the product. It's a fact of life, strange, but a seemingly immutable law, that marginal products of this nature almost always EXACTLY BREAK EVEN. That is, if D is the development cost, N is the market size and P is the market price, D = N*P. Every business plan in the world exhibits this law. It's only in extreme cases that the law breaks down - the extreme case where the product becomes popular.
If an item is popular, this all breaks down. The market price is unchanged, because popularity doesn't affect market price, since a popoular product can enforce a monopoly - it's popular, so you pay what we say you pay. Look at how much Lucas charged for the Episode 1 video! Even without this explicit greed, the price charged is generally the same as for similar, but unpopular, items. So the Britney Spears CD costs about the same as the Cradle of Filth CD. The development cost is the same - maybe slightly higher if the developers knew beforehand it was going to be popular (Britney had a better producer than the Filth). But N goes through the roof by a factor of 100 or more. So you look at N and P and D and you say, "this company is greedy".
OK, now the whole problem arises because of the mismatch between N*P and D. There is no physical law that says N*P = D. In fact, N*P = D is only achieved by fiddling the books. You reduce D so it matches N*P (cheap and cheerful PSX games); you increase P so it matches D/N (research-level textbooks); the only thing you can't directly affect is N, but marketing attempts to do this.
Now, what would be nice is if copright law, said that P would vary with N. That is, the first people to buy would pay more, then the cost would gradually go down until, when enough people have bought the product, development has been paid for and the product enters the public domain.
This is what happens in HARDWARE now. The "early adopters" of CD players paid - what - $500 for a player. Then as economies of scale kicked in the price dropped until now a CD player is a commodity item you can pick up for $40 upwards.
If the same thing happened in software, then paying per copy would not be the same thing at all. You'd be paying, not for a copy, but TOWARDS THE COSTS. And when they are paid (say, when they are paid four times over, so everyone involved can make a healthy profit) then the whole thing enters the public domain and is free.
This is what people EXPECT of these old movies, old video games (hello, Mattel!), old TV shows, etc. etc. but corporate greed is such that they won't let them go. Disney has made back the money it spent on Mickey Mouse many many times over - why not let him enter the public domain?
So, to summarize, I don't think software wants to be free. It doesn't, it costs money to make and it needs to make that money back. But it doesn't have to be shackled to corporate greed.
If the media industries voluntarily moved towards a system like this, people would love them for it.
--
It's a
-- Danny Vermin