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Take a Mac User to Lunch

Posted by pudge on from the any-place-that-has-good-steak-is-good-for-me dept.

A Slashdot reader writes "LinuxWorld is running a story explaining how Mac OS X may help break down the walls for non-Windows operating systems, including Linux."

3 of 477 comments (clear)

  1. AN OPEN LETTER TO HOBBYISTS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    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

  2. open source ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    what part of osx is open source ?
    if it's open source then why isn't it free ?

    how is it different from linux open source code ?

    it seems apple is just confusing the terminoligies here to facilitate the marketing and the push to win over OSX devotees. Trying to take advantage of the impetus that linux and the OSS movement has generated on its own. Jobs seems very wily in bringing apple to a stage where he is trying to win (or trick) the linux crowd over to the apple "side". i know a devoted apple follower :) and he's always spending money or promoting apple and it's products some how. This whole thing is weird...

    anyway can someone elucidate my initial observations ? in simple terms.

  3. Ate An Apple User For Lunch by airuck · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    An OSX user I know was impressed by Apples performance claims with BLAST (basic local alignment search tool) and challenged my dual AMD to a drag race. We went through some wild contortions to find a benchmarking condition in which his similarly priced Apple box could win a race (mucking about with word sizes), but the AMD box won by a significant margin.
    OSX will likely appeal to bioinformatics tool users as well as at least some tool makers.

    --
    First entomology, then virology, and finally bioinformatics systems. Bugs follow me wherever I go.