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30th Anniversary of Gates' Letter to HCC
suso writes "30 years ago today, Bill Gates wrote the infamous Open Letter to Hobbyists about licensing of Altair BASIC to the Homebrew Computer Club. Looking back it's interesting to read this emotionally written document as it is probably Gate's first publicly written opinion about licensing software." From the letter: "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."
Interesting to see that Bill Gates hasn't changed much in 30 years! He still hates casual software piracy; the only difference is now he has much more influence...
My sig is permanently on strike.
Since there was no incentive for Micro-Soft to write good software, they haven't since that time.
ed
That's a joke, son.
One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written.
Well it looks like Gates was right when it comes to MS software. Damn those hobbyists....
Odd how Bill Gates doesn't really like to tell the side of the story where he stole PDP-10 time from a Seattle company (which went out of business), one of the Universities in Seattle (which kicked him and Paul Allen out when they found out about it), and even Harvard University.
Yes, the PDP-10 time used to run 8080 simulators. Used to write that initial Basic interpreter ... stolen.
Pot. Kettle. Black.
I agree with Bill Gates where he writes:
Hardware must be paid for, but soft-ware is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
If he had advocated the spread of free software then I'd be shocked I suppose.....
He makes a good point. Intellectual property is something that should be defended in order to preserve good order and for the sake of those who do the work. If there is no incentive to make money in a certain field, progress will suffer in a society such as a capitalist one.
Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software.
Instead, he ended up hiring 50,000 of them and deluged the commercial market with crappy software.
Oh well, at least he acheived the deluge part.
...where you would "activate" your software license by locally printing out a punch tape which you mail to him and receive a response punch tape with your BASIC interpreter key. It didn't go over because toggling some front panel switches caused you to have to reactivate and mail a new punch tape to Gates.
If somebody is selling software, taking a copy of it and using it without paying for it is not cool. Taking a copy and selling copies of the copies is even less cool.
I mean, look, we get on people for GPL violations if they use GPL code in something and won't let people have the source code. Why is that bad? Because they are using somebody else's stuff without permission. The author has made it available under some terms, and other people want to make money off of it without following the terms. That is rude; it is unethical; and it is illegal.
Now, given all the stuff that Microsoft has done over the years, i don't think Bill Gates has a lot of room for the moral outrage. And the world might have been a better place had he shared the spirit of the hobbyists - the idea of freely sharing. But he still has a point.
They are the ones who give hobbyists a bad name, and should be kicked out of any club meeting they show up at.
People would show up at club meetings and sell pirated copies of commercial software? And people didn't see anything wrong with this?
Frankly, every time I read this letter, I'm very damned impressed with Bill Gates. He's worked very had to create an environment where commercial software can exist, and I'm very damned grateful to him for it.
As I recall, 4k basic for the Altair was written on an Altair emulator running on a PDP-10 running TOPS-10 at Harvard, which the students were not authorized to use for commercial purposes.
Regardless of the chuckles and oh-so-funny jokes coming from the peanut gallery on this, software sold by Microsoft then and now (and by thousands of other commercial vendors) has a certain licensing agreement associated with it. Whether this is "right", "wrong", "good" or "evil", that's the way it is. The alternative is not to use the software - just as the alternative to dealing with the RIAA is not to listen to their music.
There you have Bill Gates's basic view of the world: "I've done all this work and you owe me." Maybe he still thinks that way; I've never met him so I dunno. Well, he's been paid back a few times over for his investment. I am always struck by his line "The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000." Note that he doesn't say that it *cost* him $40,000, only that the value of the time exceeded that amount. What's up with that? Where'd he get that computer time and who paid for it?
I guess lots of "users" did get back to pay up in the end :)
It isn't *Gate's*, it is Gates'. The guy's name isn't Bill Gate.
well. what can I say? the truth is the truth.
But in the end. I wouldn't be where I am today ( computer programming skills )
and most hobby computerists at that...
if we didn't "steal" our software.
But now that I am a little older and not a kid anymore I find
it good to pay for my software that I use professionally at least.
But now with the open source community...
things might turn to be a little different. We won't have to call what we
do stealing.
Given MS's success, despite piracy out of the gate...
That's true. What's more, stealing computer time was arguably much worse than stealing Gates' software since copying costs nobody anything.
I Want To Believe
I don't get it.
Is it significant because it's "the first time" someone argued that software ought to be paid for like a shrinkwrapped product?
Are you supposed to laugh at Gates's shortsightedness because "hobbyists" developed enterprise grade software like Linux, Apache, etc. for free? (a myth)
Did this letter have any effect at all? Didn't Gates & Co. just figure out they should sell to businesses instead of hobbyists?
The scientific tools of the day would have been fortran and C. If you wanted mass appeal then basic was certainly the way to go, but APL is a strange way to extend your market reach.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
So... now that he has his 10 programmers, is he going to write really good software???
Just bought a new quantum computer, but I'm uncertain how it works.
In Soviet Russia, ALTAIR BASIC kicks you!
At least he's a consistent d*ck.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Of course, the exact same argument is being made today, by Microsoft and Adobe, but also by the RIAA and MPAA. It's funny how Gates earlier words on the subject seem to carry so much more force. At the time he had a small company with an honest mission, and it's hard not to feel a little bit bad about how everyone was using his software but hardly anybody was paying him for it.
Fortunately, what is true for small markets is not true for larger, established markets. Enough companies make money off of OSS to help support its development, and free music will hopefully become viable as the cost of production falls closer and closer to hobbyist levels. That being said, there is a fundamental truth to Gates' words: successful pioneers deserve to be paid.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
Fortunately, the GPL has given us a better way to pay people for the work of creating good software: They get paid with everybody else's work.
suso can't seem to decide who wrote the letter in question. In the headline, he refers to a fellow named Gate. Then he mentions Bill Gates, but later starts talking about that Gate guy again.
Odd how Bill Gates doesn't really like to tell the side of the story where he stole PDP-10 time from ... one of the Universities in Seattle (which kicked him and Paul Allen out when they found out about it), and even Harvard University.
Hey this was the 70's man. If the lab instructors hadn't been spending all their time smoking pot, printing out reams of ASCII pr0n, and hitting on coeds (who were just going to shoot them down anyway) they might have been more aware someone was putting the PDP-10 to profitable use.
Two. Wrongs. Make. Neither. Right.
In short, there's no reason for you to point out that Bill Gates also stole. It doesn't make his argument less convincing or less applicable. The person making the argument is a completely irrelevant aspect of the argument itself. An argument is true or false no matter who says it, no matter their character or past actions.
The fact that you're attacking his past actions instead of the argument he made is telling. I think he has a point. Would you like to reply to his actual argument instead of just attacking the man?
If you want to discuss all the other, horrible things that Bill Gates may have done
...since copying costs nobody anything.
/. excuse for stealing software. It doesn't cost them anything besides the annual salaries, time, office rental, etc (just small things that can add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars!), but they are still infact losing potential sales. For example how would you like it if you made your living as an architect and someone stole your blue prints, and then told you "well it isn't costing you anything"?
argh, again with typical
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 now should expect given these words that OS like XP and Vista should be professional, good-looking and well documented (no hidden API) ...
...
Mostly BSD, Linux, Minix, FreeDos and a lot of open-source programs. Perhaps people are now in debt with unkle Bill and develop this for free since they have still BASIC in the 70's. Or perhaps BASIC was (has the name say) just to BASIC for people to perform some thing more complex then "Hello World!!!"
So that lake of money to develop professional software may explain the crappy stuff made by microsoft in the 80's
Maybe one day on 1'st April
There's a lot to understand about the early days of personal computing. Consider Microsoft: it's biggest accomplishment was porting BASIC (for which they used publicly-available source code) to port to the ALTAIR (for which Mr. Allen wrote the interpreter). So, the BASIC which Mr. Gates so zealously defended was taken from BASIC source code which was publicly available.
His defense of copyright was hypocritical, at best. The one piece of code to which Microsoft had clear copyright (the ALTAIR emulator) was written on a college PDP machine, and wasn't contested. The bit that *was* contested was code *which Gates himself* had taken from public domain.
The historical context is simple. At the time, code was shared freely, to the profit of everyone involved. Everyone stood tall, until Gates and his ilk arrived, standing on the shoulders of giants and proclaiming they were the tallest motherfuckers around.
The whole idea of someone "owning" a chunk of computing is bunk. It always has been. It hurts us all. Do you think Microsoft would be where they are today without freely-available code? If so, take back Altair BASIC, take back the TCP stack in MS-Windows (taken from BSD TCP), take back MS Internet Explorer and MS HTTP. Take it all away, and see where Microsoft stands.
Historically, his rant was nothing but petty hypocritical gutter-sniping from an ultra-rich college punk.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Aye, piracy is piracy -- but copyright infringment ain't piracy, ye lilly-livered bilge rat!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Below is a reply in the subsequent issue from the "hobbyists". Interesting to see what things was like back then -- same discussions, arguments etc. The more things change, the more things stay the same.
Man, it feels good to blaze away on the keyboard once in a while. If only I can code this fast! Any errors are solely mine of course. Please check originals for identity of poster, additional context regarding this letter, and to verify any typos.
(localroger quietly hides his paid-for copy of Microsoft 8080 Basic from those days)
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/ho mebrew/V2_02/homebrew_V2_02_p2.jpg
Very much worth reading - somewhat articulate. Essentially the author blames Gates poor business decisions, then points out that it might not be wise to alienate potential future customers.
Incidentally, beware of a minor drawback of this new way of thinking: in your old age, when the novelty of vast fortunes you have meticulously conned and abused out of others wears out and when that 340500sq ft. mansion feels cold and univiting despite of 350 maids and 250 buttlers, you might find that nasty affliction, called "conscience", starting to ache you here and there.
Dude, whatever. Bill Gates has enough money that he could fill up a swimming pool with money, Scrooge McDuck-style. Obviously I'm not him, but if I were ever feeling down, that would be enough to make me cackle with evil glee right there. If I were having a particularly terrible week, maybe I'd buy an entire country, or build an orbiting space battle platform crewed by hot women with Eastern European accents and use it to vapourize my enemies.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
$2 per hour is pitiful. $25 would be more like it, but people are often too cheap and self-centered. Even geeks. It is rather amazing to look at that document and compare it to the Word(tm) docs we take for granted today.
True.. but I like to follow the example of industry leaders like Micro$oft (works for $ony, the RIAssA, MPAssA & others too)
"Only steal from them until you're big enough to bury them in lawsuits"
"What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?"
- Linus Torvalds and another couple hundred
- Andrew Tridgell and another couple dozen
- Larry Wall and another couple thousand
- Marc Andreessen and who knows how many
- Repeat for several thousand other projects...
"The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software"
Until 1991.
Guess that's why he hates Linux so much, they blew his whole argument.
-- "In order to have power, I must be taken seriously." -Mojo Jojo
Gates' current attitude toward hobbyists is somewhat ironic, given his origins in the industry. I'm not just talking about Linux; this article concerns Windows-using hobbyists.
Really? Tell that to the janitor at Red Hat or the CEO or the sales reps. They seem to want to get paid in cash. And they've actually managed to convince you that somehow you don't deserve any of their money despite you doing the actual creative work. Yeah. Great idea.
Funny thing is, the whole "GPL" thing was originally a way for CASH-RICH geeks to pay something back for all the millions we'd made as part of a theoretical "Gift Economy" that seemed to rely on us geeks giving gifts and the marketing weasels taking them. Odd - that part seems to be skipped a lot in discussion these days.
From: RMS@MIT-OZ@mit-eddie.UUCP (Richard Stallman)
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards,net.usoft
Subject: new UNIX implementation
Date: Tue, 27-Sep-83 13:35:59 EDT
Organization: MIT AI Lab, Cambridge, MA
Free Unix! Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu's Not Unix), and give it away free to everyone who can use it. Contributions of time, money, programs and equipment are greatly needed.
To begin with, GNU will be a kernel plus all the utilities needed to write and run C programs: editor, shell, C compiler, linker, assembler, and a few other things. After this we will add a text formatter, a YACC, an Empire game, a spreadsheet, and hundreds of other things. We hope to supply, eventually, everything useful that normally comes with a Unix system, and anything else useful, including on-line and hardcopy documentation.
GNU will be able to run Unix programs, but will not be identical to Unix. We will make all improvements that are convenient, based on our experience with other operating systems. In particular, we plan to have longer filenames, file version numbers, a crashproof file system, filename completion perhaps, terminal-independent display support, and eventually a Lisp-based window system through which several Lisp programs and ordinary Unix programs can share a screen. Both C and Lisp will be available as system programming languages. We will have network software based on MIT's chaosnet protocol, far superior to UUCP. We may also have something compatible with UUCP.
Who Am I? I am Richard Stallman, inventor of the original much-imitated EMACS editor, now at the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT. I have worked extensively on compilers, editors, debuggers, command interpreters, the Incompatible Timesharing System and the Lisp Machine operating system. I pioneered terminal-independent display support in ITS. In addition I have implemented one crashproof file system and two window systems for Lisp machines.
Why I Must Write GNU I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. I cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a software license agreement.
So that I can continue to use computers without violating my principles, I have decided to put together a sufficient body of free software so that I will be able to get along without any software that is not free.
How You Can Contribute I am asking computer manufacturers for donations of machines and money. I'm asking individuals for donations of programs and work.
One computer manufacturer has already offered to provide a machine. But we could use more. One consequence you can expect if you donate machines is that GNU will run on them at an early date. The machine had better be able to operate in a residential area, and not require sophisticated cooling or power.
Individual programmers can contribute by writing a compatible duplicate of some Unix utility and giving it to me. For most projects, such part-time distributed work would be very hard to coordinate; the independently-written parts would not work together. But for the particular task of replacing Unix, this problem is absent. Most interface specifications are fixed by Unix compatibility. If each contribution works with the rest of Unix, it will probably work with the rest of GNU.
If I get donations of money, I may be able to hire a few people full or part time. The salary won't be high, but I'm looking for people for whom knowing they are helping humanity is as important as money. I view this as a way of enabling dedicated people to devote their full energies to working on GNU by sparing them the need to make a living in another way.
For more information, contact me.
Arpanet mail: RMS@MIT-MC.ARPA
US Snail: Richard Stallman
166 Prospect St, Cambridge, MA 02139
Obviously that depends on what amuses you. I suspect Bill was at one time amused by climbing over backs of others to show how "superior" he was to all those around him. And just like swimming in a pool full of money that probably got old quickly. As to buying a country, there still appear to be some barriers present in the form of the local inhabitants, otherwise the Pentagon would have bought Iraq instead of going to all that trouble. And a space station appears to have a problem of feasibilty. A slave harem of Eastern European women might have worked, alas it was apparently incompatible with the image Billy was trying to present of himself. Probably a tactical error.
So, how are you enjoying your first year of college? Feels great knowing you're not going to get in trouble for skipping class huh, and no longer having to forge notes from your mom! I loved it all.
"Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share." - Gates
Well, Gates may have totally missed the Internet, but he can sure claim to have predicted Open Source! (at least, if you take his words out of context)
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
And have Microsoft realize their empire on software development is no more. Right now we have enough development tools available or in progress: .NET),
MONO (alternative for
Gambas (alternative for Visual Basic - linux only tho),
KDevelop (for C++ under Linux),
Code::Blocks (for C++ under Windows),
wxPython, DABO (Foxpro alternative, uses wxPython)...
Soon Bill Gates won't have to worry about people stealing his development tools... because NOBODY WILL USE THEM! X-D
if windows would have been free open source, he probably wouldnt be as rich as he is now. And in the end, thats all that matters!
And became the richest man on the planet as a result. However, the hobbyist community is still thriving - now more than ever.
Things aren't perfect, but all things considered it's turned out pretty good. The software industry is still (IMHO) one of the most exciting and thriving industries in existance, and has been for the last 30 years.
So what's the problem? It's insanely myopic to believe that we would be better off if we could go back in time and force all software to be free (as in speech).
I'm not questioning the validity of this statement in this post, but it would be great if someone would post some links to evidence supporting this allegation.
The whores get mad when the sluts give it away for free.
Well, don't forget that he thwarted Wordperfect, OS/2, Netscape and used his monopolic position to become the richest man on earth.
In summary, Gates happened to be the wrong person at the right time and place.
"Calling all of your potential future customers 'thieves', is perhaps 'uncool' marketing strategy!"
:)
With the RIAA suing so many people over piracy, i think i'll print that letter and put it in a golden frame
He says he's sorry about the misunderstanding. You can make all the copies of Altair BASIC you want now.
Okay, okay, okay... This is just a joke! I'm sure Altair BASIC is as valuable a piece of IP as it ever was.
(n/t)
...and they call it "product".
I believe they are a little more careful in protecting their uhhh "stuff", and a little more willing to avoid "lawful" means and go for direct intervention if they feel like they have been ripped off.
I believe there is an historical example of computer code one may google "promis"
Not saying if that is good or bad, but I can see a point in calling information of any type a product, it's just an intangible product. In the overt commercial world I believe copyright and trademark are adequate protections, whereas patents are a very bad idea.
I think what he means is that you aren't deprived of the fruits of your labour, in this case, the blueprints (assuming they were copied and not stolen). The other guy takes them, but you still have them. So you aren't deprived of your work.
What you are deprived of is a monopoly on the right to benefit from the fruits of your labour. Without taking either side of the debate on this, it is important to recognize that there is nothing that naturally guarantees you this monopoly. If you amass knowledge (a feat that definitely can and often is prohibitively expensive) with an intent to capitalize on it, and someone copies that knowledge in its digital or written form with an intent to capitalize on it in the same way that you intended to (but without investing the time and money required to do the research), then you could definitely say that the person doing the copying has done something immoral -- but he has not actually deprived you of the fruits of your labour.
He has, most likely, decreased the amount of money you'll be able to make. This I think is what the RIAA and its ilk mean when they say that you are stealing -- not the music, per se, but the profits that they would have had had you been forced to buy instead of just copy.
Unfortunately, this argument is relatively hard to make conclusively, because you're arguing about something that hasn't happened yet and is not at all guaranteed to happen. It's like Minority Report -- is it moral to incarcerate criminals who have not yet commited a crime but that you believe are certain to?
I think from a philosophical perspective, all of this is very interesting, and is in fact far more complex than both sides want to admit.
Fortunately, we decided early on that copyright infringement is a crime, so there's not much guess work involved here: copying something that you did not create without a license allowing you to do so is illegal. It's not stealing, because theft deprives the owner of property, but it is still illegal.
Everything else is just mincing words.
I'm quite found of Code:Blocks , except for a somewhat weak debugger frontend. Its actually written using wxWidgets, so it works just fine under Windows (wx binds to win32 api) AND Linux (wx binds to gtk2). I was actually just building myself a package for ArchLinux earlier today, as a quick warning the guy that packages up the releases runs Windows, so you have to fix the dos style line endings in the build scripts before building it, but it works just fine.
Is it true that Gates & Co. stole computer time to develop Altair BASIC? I've read several sources that claim that the "victims" of this piracy themselves stole time on a PDP-10 at Harvard's Aiken Computation Laboratory to develop their product. One source says the PDP-10 was purchased by DARPA, which means that Gates stole from U.S. taxpayers.
Bill Gates would agree with you, but you might want to do as he does rather than as he says. Here's some nice reading material for you. It does not even mention the big greedy grab of macsyma, nastran and other software developed at public cost. Stealing software, on way or another, is something Bill is good at. It's a shame you should take any moral advice from someone who thinks it's OK to sue public school systems for sharing software.
What you walk away with is very wrong. In most circumstances, you should think sharing with your friends is more important than forcing your friends give more money to Bill and Co to be able to work with non free file formats. If you want to avoid punishment for sharing, avoid non-free software. You can't share what you don't know and free software is better than non free.
use GPL code in something and won't let people have the source code. Why is that bad? Because they are using somebody else's stuff without permission.
It is rude and wrong, but not because you violated the will of the "owners". The greater outrage is the reason for not sharing the source code: you are trying to control your users. There's no other reason to hide source code for software you want others to use. At the very least, your added features are difficult to modify, so the user is unable to use it for their purposes. At the worst, you add DRM abuse that directly limits what the user can do with their own time and effort. Do you really think you need someone else's permission to do things with your computer? Using code from people who know better only adds insult to injury.
Code ownership is only needed as long as people would try to steal your work to abuse others. When the last of the non free software companies that emerged thirty years ago finish sinking in red ink, and there's nothing left but free software why bother with "ownership"? Yes, you will still be able to earn a living by writing free software. It's easier when your tools and support environment is free.
The core argument Bill Gates made 30 years ago was wrong. No one needs commercial software because users and others will indeed provide quality software and documentation. The way Bill has driven others from the field proves that non free software can only proffit by theft and draconian control.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
So, hopefully sometime soon Bill will hire those 10 programmers and start deluging us with great software. We've been wating a long time.
Free Conference Call -- No Spam, High Quality
No, there was plenty of money left over to cover those things because, unlike their competitors, they stole the computer time required to develop their software. So why not steal their BASIC? What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
It's not surprising at all that they were working on APL - it was a very popular language/programming environment at the time. For example, the IBM 5200s (often cited as the first personal computers) could be configured with APL or BASIC.
In terms of "scientific tools", I don't remember seeing any serious Fortran compilers until the IBM PC became available and ditto for Pascal. I don't think C was considered to be implementable on small 8 bit systems. A lot of "scientific" programming at the time was actually done with Visicalc (I seem to remember an add by Apple or Visicalc where an optical designer was using an Apple ][ and Visicalc to design lens systems).
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
> In reply to the grand parent post it is actually a spelling mistake not a grammer mistake
I think you meant to say:
"In reply to the grandparent post, it is actually a spelling mistake not a grammar mistake."
Note the proper spelling of "grandparent" and "grammar" and the proper use of the comma.
Don't correct people unless you know what the hell you are talking about.
And, by the way, I think "slashdot" is spelled with an "sl", not an "sh".
--
Quag
I can imagine a young Bill Gates sitting in his appartment in New Mexico wtih a light bulb going off over his head thinking "...Marketing...Undervalued Product..."
Imagine what the world would be like if this guy could look into a crystal ball and had written a letter that went something like:
"Dear Bill,
We do appreciate the hard work on behalf of the hobby and hope that you keep it up.
Your work does have value and we will encourage our members to pay for the software that they are using.
However, we do hope that you recognize that this is a hobby and you will price your software reasonably and continue to work with your fellow hobbyists to provide solutions that they want."
Unfortunately, I can't imagine BG ever taking this letter to heart.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
I care! In fact, I care that they should NOT get paid.
Why? If all those codemonkeys in Redmond had not been paid, then Windows might never have been written, and people might not have suffered from blue screens, Clippy and closed file formats. Something better than Windows might have been created instead. Maybe all those monkeys would have been hacking on Linux, NetBSD or Plan B instead.
But wait... maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the folks in Redmond are really coding for the fun of it. Maybe they would have written Windows anyway, and being paid just made it more fun? That's a scary thought: maybe all those $billions were given to MS for nothing? We might have had the same today without paying the MS tax? Ohhh noooo.... (head explodes)
Incredible how much a single letter from 30 years ago still shows the philosophy behind today's giant company. Some people never change, it seems...I never cease to be amazed.
Well put! It's all about the monopoly, or lack thereof.
I really like the part where Gates says "I would appreciate letters from any one
who wants to pay up," but doesn't actually tell the reader what the price is for
the stolen software.
It's funny that he now thinks of pioneers as "loss leaders" and pledges not to enter a "market" until it's "mature". "Mature" means there's enough public awareness to buy one of the "loss leaders" for a song or crush the rest of them for nothing.
The biggest mistake, however, is to buy the core message. Free software, developed by users, blows non free software away. The "quality" software and docmentation he said could only be created by paying him is here and "flooding the market." The whole binary ecology is based on a lie. The biggest part of that lie is that there's no other way to make software and that we must sacrifice our freedom to have computers that work.
The tide is already turning. DRM'd music is making the cost of non free software obvious to everyone. The abundance of free software that anyone can download and use, blows everything Bill says right out of the water. Your children will not be able to believe that public school systems were once sued for sharing text editors.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Gates.Mirick.html
In the fall of 1968, Computer Center Corporation opened for business in Seattle. It was offering computing time at good rates, and one of the chief programmers working for the corporation had a child attending Lakeside. A deal was struck between Lakeside Prep School and the Computer Center Corporation that allowed the school to continue providing it's students with computer time. [Wallace, 1992, p. 27] Gates and his comrades immediately began exploring the contents of this new machine. It was not long before the young hackers started causing problems. They caused the system to crash several times and broke the computers security system. They even altered the files that recorded the amount of computer time they were using. They were caught and the Computer Center Corporation banned them from the system for several weeks.
I prefer to use the term, copying prohibited in the United States, rather than the confusing term, piracy. Clearly, copying is a matter of local law and not universal right. Laws surrounding copying vary depending on where it occurs. In most countries copying software is not a crime. Gates and his ilk have managed to attach a stigma to copying in the United States and so it is illegal here. But he also tries to exercise undue influence on developing countries using, yes, bullying tactics. I find him loathsome.
an ill wind that blows no good
I myself expect to be paid for my products and I don't think people are upset that "Bill" in the guise of Micro-soft wants to be paid for his efforts. What really upsets people is that he saturated the market with crap and is either squeezing us out of the market altogether or if we come and play on his terms (in other words consult for his products) he collects a huge tithe in the form of software kits, training credentials etc. To keep it in the analogy of the playground he's a bully and playing with him around isn't fun and this is why we had to create a new economy of free software: getting paid for consulting and training on it.
I just looked at Monty Widenius's company this morning and thought to myself damm... way to go and if there's any inspiration floating around then it's those of us "small fries" who are leveraging this newer model of doing business as opposed to the old model of holding a whip in one hand and another to collect the shekel. But even as I rant the bigtime players are also catching on bigtime.
Look at Sun. They open-sourced Solaris 10 and are thinking taking it GPLv3. It is clear where they see their future at least for their OS: not so much selling it per cpu units than selling services around it. They might someday even abandon making their admittedly fine machines as they've been looking at using x86 chips for their lower models. IBM is still stuck in the middle, renting z/OS out per cpu units while other parts of it are investing heavily in our model (Eclipse, gotta be thankful for that).
Microsoft will have to go down that alley soon, as I have said they've saturated the market to the point their own products are competing with each other. They're putting a lot of effort into their "Vista" project but as people lined up in front of stores a day before Windows 95 was released, I can't see that happening for "Vista". At some point in the future, probably within the next three years we'll be getting the Microsoft embrace.
You'll not find any truthful supporting links as it's poorly crafted fiction. I attended Lakeside when both Bill Gates and Paul Allen were there. I was a couple of years behind Bill. Lakeside had a timeshare connection to a remote PDP machine for which the school purchased blocks of computing time in advance. Although it was not ever fully discussed, rumor at the time was that Paul and Bill inadvertently used an entire (expected) school year's worth of time in a single weekend. The amount of time was worth about $5,000 and although it caused a bit of a ruckus it was also admired by most of the students and much of the faculty (my mother was a faculty member at the time). The Allen and Gates families repaid the school and not much was thought of the affair.
No one was kicked out. No theft was ever claimed and the time was used in an academic manner--experimentation--rather than for any commercial purpose.
This was a couple years before the Altair Basic was written in hotel rooms near the Harvard campus.
Don't correct people, unless you know what the hell you are talking about.
That was the point I was trying to make to the parent, of the other post I created. It appears that you also missed a comma in the above quote, I took the liberty of adding it.
And, by the way, I think "slashdot" is spelled with an "sl", not an "sh".
Actually, I believe it would be:
And, by the way, I think "slashdot" is spelled with a "sl", not a "sh".
Note the proper usage of 'a' instead of 'an', because the quoted text started with a consonant, not a vowel.
Let's face it, if the "Nobody ever got fired for buying" IBM hadn't been an early licensee of MSFT wares, the market (esp. corporate) might've had the courage to demand better software
Too true.
Bill Gates was not a thief; he just understood that PDP-10 time is a fundamental right. He was just trying out the PDP-10 to see if he wanted to buy one.
for the part about the Constitution - the words "intellectual property" never appear in the Constitution (and in fact were not really used until the 1960s). The Constitution allows Congress to offer limited monopolies to artists and inventers to serve as an incentive for them to keep creating and discovering. It's not a "property" nor is it really a "right" - it's a privilege that Congress is allowed to grant for a limited time. At the time it was 14 years, I think; now it is 70 years after the death of the artist -- ridiculous, as you point out.
Funny is also that with Sun considering releasing Solaris under the GPL, GNU is soon to be Unix :-)
Free Software: the software by the people, of the people and for the people. Develop! Share! Enhance! Enjoy!
pervert markets, corrupt public processes, cheat and deceive consumers, stifle and trample competition, etc.
hey, if the rich are so damn capable, why do they always act so damn unethically?
Here's how it works in the real world. I will copy what I want, as many times as I want, whenever I wish to. No DRM scheme in hardware, software, or firmware will stop me. There is always a way. I'm not paying for a COPY of something YOU STILL HAVE. End of story.
How come your comments don't jive with the Register, an article in the Statesman called "The Making Of The Empire" that was published in 26 February 2001, and other sources that basically say they changed log files monitoring time on the system, were caught and that they were banned from the system? Then, weeks later, a deal was struck where they could get time in exchange for documenting bugs?
Yes, it's eerie. The first page of the magazine just says "First Page!" And there's a story called "Imagine..." about clustering Altairs....
http://www.zmag.org/parecon/indexnew.htm
Bill Gates, Paul Allen and, two other hackers from Lakeside formed the Lakeside Programmers Group in late 1968. They were determined to find a way to apply their computer skills in the real world. The first opportunity to do this was a direct result of their mischievous activity with the school's computer time. The Computer Center Corporation's business was beginning to suffer due to the systems weak security and the frequency that it crashed. Impressed with Gates and the other Lakeside computer addicts' previous assaults on their computer, the Computer Center Corporation decided to hire the students to find bugs and expose weaknesses in the computer system. In return for the Lakeside Programming Group's help, the Computer Center Corporation would give them unlimited computer time [Wallace, 1992, p. 27]. The boys could not refuse. Gates is quoted as saying "It was when we got free time at C-cubed (Computer Center Corporation) that we really got into computers. I mean, then I became hardcore. It was day and night" [Wallace, 1992, p. 30]. Although the group was hired just to find bugs, they also read any computer related material that the day shift had left behind. The young hackers would even pick employees for new information. It was here that Gates and Allen really began to develop the talents that would lead to the formation of Microsoft seven years later.
So yes they ran through the school's yearly allotment of time on the PDP-10, they also caused quite a bit of problems but they ended up fixing those problems in exchange for unlimited time on C-Cubed's computer system. Hardly outright theft of computer time. More like normal hacker curiosity/exploration followed by reforming when caught.I find it horribly ironic that Gates and Allen helped improve the security of C-Cubed's computer system seeing as their Windows products have done a lot to lower security in the years since though. ;)
Oh, but surely we misunderstand that incident 'cause we all know that (FTA):
" As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. "
But surely not Bill and Allen!!!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
30th Anniversary of Gate's Letter to HCC ...
... as it is probably Gate's first publicly written opinion ...
I thought his name was Bill Gates, not Bill Gate?
Anonymous Pedant?
Tag lost or not installed.
Also, back in the day, universities didn't make anyone sign contracts that they owned a slice of whatever you developed. One you did your assignments (and let other people finish theirs), you were fairly free to work on your own projects.
People pay for free software creation too. The Gates model of, "do as I say, or nothing happens" is false and has more to do with what I found most ironic:
That being said, there is a fundamental truth to Gates' words: successful pioneers deserve to be paid.
This is not entrepreneurship, it is entitlement. There are no Microsoft innovations and there never will be. It's all been whine, hype and bully from the beginning. The M$ ascendency has been at the cost of real innovators and the public at large.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Yes, but Microsoft has since learnt how to use casual piracy as a marketing tool. Letting people copy their software is an investment in the future for them.
Not really, that's more of an operating system tactic, Bill was selling BASIC at the time. The lesson Bill learned was to charge per CPU shipped, first by getting into Apple and Commodore ROMs, and eventually leading to the infamous "Microsoft tax" on PCs that leave the factory. Thank the casual pirates for that.
To think, eventually very many people would eventually go on to make not only better compilers, but entire operating systems, applications, and utilities, totally for free, with source included, just for the hell of it. Not only would they not make money on it, but they'd give the fruits of their labor away, get slammed by the business world, get chased around by lawyers and only get more determined.
Don't get me wrong, he makes a valid point. I'm guessing there is another side, including that his software was probably overpriced, probably more than what hobbyists really needed, and probably could have been more profitable if these things were taken into account before someone started coding. That doesn't make the situation right, but it does indicate a miscalculation; he probably could not have made money on that product, period, why bitch about it and alienate people?
I cannot personally vouch for the veracity of Gates' early history provided at this site but it seems to show that the events El Reg mentions happenned but that the time between them was several years. Basically they got in trouble in prep school in 1968 and then did the digging through code around that time as well. They wrote Altair Basic in 1974, 6 years later. So while they might have kept the code and copied it, it's also possible they didn't. I have no idea which is true, but it sounds like The Register decided to sensationalize their version a bit.
Personally I can't stand Gates', but I try to be fair. Both seem to indicate that they used PDP-10 time at Harvard to simulate the Altair 8080 in order to make their Altair Basic but nothing says Harvard was upset about it. It probably wasn't terribly kosher to do so but they got away with it.
The usage of 'a' and 'an' is dictated by the phonetics of the subsequent syllable, not the orthography. Thus, "an hour", not "a hour". Presumably "sl" is pronounced "es-el", so "an 'sl'" is correct.
..He said "do do"...
[Slashdot Comments We Liked]
"Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted."
Thanks to everyone's favorite operating system, now almost every computer in stores have no good software and will be used by people who don't understand programming.
"Will quality software be written for the hobby market?"
Not by Microsoft, that's for sure (well, there's a few good microsoft programs, but they stopped selling and supporting them long ago when they found out they could sell crappy software and still make millions). A nice guy called Stallman wrote/write's quality software, though. Maybe go ask him for some.
...to write around the phrase "do do". Otherwise, sophomoric jerks like me will make fun of you.
HURD is just the next generation of EMACS.
Just imagine how successful Bill Gates could be today, if he hadn't been such a jerk so early in his career! Pissing off the whole hobbyist community cost him dearly.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Either way, when they released DOS 6, they didn't even have the decency to remove Stackers name from the stolen code.
Bill?
..
Is that you?
Has anyone seen this on the 'net ?
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned this but instead of:
I think you meant:
Or even:
ID-10-T is a way of life
What Bill is basically saying is if the HCC pirate their software Microsoft will go out of business! Damn you HCC look what happened because you didn't steal enough of Bill's code! Windows 2, Windows 3, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP: ALL YOUR FAULT!
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
Anybody see anything amiss in the subject of the article? I've always wanted to be a grammar nazi, but I guess I'll have to settle for adjusting apostrophes. Snif.
And it is only Gates, ferchrissakes. There really are people who can't write His Evil Highness' name by now?
That was the point I was trying to make to the parent, of the other post I created. It appears that you also missed a comma in the above quote, I took the liberty of adding it.
I'm not 100% sure of this, but I think that a comma there is improper. At the very least there's no reason why it should be required.
is brilliant. I've never seen it used that way before. You are so fucking cool.
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.
Hasn't happened yet, and damned unlikely at this point. So why should anyone pay for bug ridden software?
Oh yeah, 640K ought to be enough for anyone.
I'm posting this anonymously so I can still mod all your posts as flamebait/troll :-)
A couple other comma errors:
That was the point I was trying to make to the parent, of the other post I created.
A comma there is DEFINITELY improper; you should remove it.
It appears that you also missed a comma in the above quote, I took the liberty of adding it.
A comma there is also definitely improper. You should replace it with a semicolon or period, or add an "and" or other similar word after the comma.
You didn't need to add the comma. You seem to have a big problem with punctuation. You use too many commas and some should be other punctuation marks.
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, though I'm not yet sure about the universe. - A Einstein
so by that logic i could say kill you and then go about saving someone else which then makes me immune to being prosecuted..
You may send money to Gates' home:
+ Dr+SE,+Albuquerque,+NM+87108&ll=35.060496,-106.581 73&spn=0.001041,0.002465&t=h
http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&q=1180+Alvarado
..since copying costs nobody anything.
/. excuse for stealing software.
argh, again with typical
That is not an excuse for anything, it is a matter of fact.
My thoughts exactly. From the parent post(s);
"It probably wasn't terribly kosher to do so but they got away with it."
and
"they changed log files monitoring time on the system, were caught and that they were banned from the system? Then, weeks later, a deal was struck where they could get time in exchange for documenting bugs."
Really, this shows their immoral business acumen at work, and shows that it has been repeated ad nauseam right from the start and continues to this day;
"See how much you can get way with, we do not care if it is legal or not, and we will just cut a deal if we do get caught."
Other examples that come to mind (besides Stacker) - illegal OEM deals, breaking DRDos-Win3.1, the antitrust trial with IE and breaking the consent decree. On and on.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
If you amass knowledge (a feat that definitely can and often is prohibitively expensive) with an intent to capitalize on it, and someone copies that knowledge in its digital or written form with an intent to capitalize on it in the same way that you intended to (but without investing the time and money required to do the research), then you could definitely say that the person doing the copying has done something immoral...
I disagree. Unless that person does something otherwise immoral in order to make this copy (like breaking into my house), or presents my work as his own, I see nothing immoral about it. Why do you think it's immoral, other than because of a vauge sense of "fairness"?
I've seen similar letters from software authors and some very scathing ones from shareware authors.
Would it be safe to say he has learned from the mindest and did what was necessesary to suceed.
I'd say so even if to suceed he had to do somethings I consider wrong.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
People just refuse to see that all property rights are a fiction.
...This may seem flamebait but people really have blinded themselves if they can't see that all property (not to mention money itself) is a fiction that only has value due to belief. Bill Gates created value out of nothing by persuading people that software by itself was worth money, and that belief is worth more billions than anyone could have imagined it would have 30 years ago. You actually pay money to buy video games from a store? (well, this is Slashdot, we know that copying is cheap. Surely software isn't worth more than the cents it costs for the media/bandwidth, right?)
There is nothing 'natural' about the fact that you left a car a car in the street and you somehow have a right to expect that it will be there when you come back. No, you don't. The government gives you monopoly on usage of the vehucle through the fiction of 'ownership', even though you are not deprived of anything if someone takes the car and returns it before you need it again.
Seriously, you folks pay full dollar for a 'Snickers' in a candy store when it's just a stupid piece of chocolate worth much less. The governement gives an artificial monopoly on the very words you see - no one else can sell "Snickers" even though the recipe is incredible easy to duplicate and no one is depriving Mars the right to continue selling their own Snickers bar if I happen to sell my Snickers bar as well.
I should log in but this is too ranty for karma burn.
Since when did letters have anniversaries?
Well, I'm not a moral absolutist, so I think cultural and personal norms define morality rather than legislation or religion, for example. So while I might think its immoral (and many others do too) you're not required to.
Having said that, the main reason I think it's immoral is exactly because of that vague of sense of fairness that you describe. It seems inappropriate for someone to benefit from the work of someone else unless that person agrees to share (which I think is an appropriate and noble thing -- hence my dedication to the free software movement). It sounds as though you agree, and so you say you wouldn't mind someone copying your stuff (we agree on this). However, to say "AC & 808140 don't mind" is not the same as saying that everyone doesn't mind (many obviously do). Even in the free software community, only the public domain guys fail to put any restrictions at all on copying.
It's important to recognize that there's a difference between developing something with the intention that it be free and developing something with the intention that it not be. Now, some people argue (including me, as it happens) that for certain classes of information, including software, preventing other people from copying is immoral in itself. Of course many people disagree with me on that. This is probably why software is protected by copyright -- in a democracy laws presumably exist because the majority agrees with them, or at least doesn't care enough about them to resist them.
On the other hand, if someone does something in order to make a living and has reasonable expectation that he should be able to do that, and someone goes ahead and benefits from his hard work without his permission, and in the process possibly makes it more difficult or even impossible for the first guy to achieve his erstwhile goal of making a living, well, I guess that just seems like a shitty thing to do. Note that this is different from saying that it should be illegal, just that it's shitty, and that's really what I mean when I say it's immoral. People do immoral (shitty) things all the time that are perfectly legal, and some things that in my mind are completely moral are illegal in some places.
This guy who wants to make a living off of his content is very different from the two of us: I develop software expressly to give it away, and perhaps you do the same with your content. Clearly, we aren't going to be incensed when someone copies our stuff.
Now, perhaps we believe that information should be free -- I certainly do, especially where software is concerned, read some of my other posts to see where I stand on the issue -- but the point of my original post was to present a relatively balanced and bias-free (insofar as that's possible) outlook on the whole debate.
Fact: you can either abide by the law, or you can copy copyrighted works without the copyright holder's permission. Pick one. As it stands, all other questions aside, that's how society is today.
Of course, I smoke pot sometimes, and that's illegal, so, perhaps being law abiding isn't what you want to do. I'm not going to be a hypocrite and call you on that.
Please quit your whining, Slashdot. Bill Gates is a great man and is helping the people of the world in more ways than probably all of us could combined. Seriously, how many lives have you helped save today?
The man deserves respect. Demonizing him is an unproductive way to promote open-source software, etc.
Today Bill will realise he's getting old...
Two different versions of history you be the judge:
l
http://www.mackido.com/History/Gates_a_Genius.htm
Bill Gates (after dropping out of college) and a friend (Paul Allen) started making software (Mid 70's). The first thing they did was steal (uh, borrow?) some computer time from a college and they implemented Basic (a Language) for the Altair Computer (made by MITS). Basic had been around for many years before Bill implemented a version of it . They did provide a service, but it is not that impressive technically to take public domain code from one machine and port it to another. Yawn. It was also very questionable (ethically) to sell a language who's definition was in public domain, and develop it on computer time borrowed from a school. But I don't think ethics bother Bill Gates too much -- and in the over all scheme of things, this was one of the lesser of the "moral gray areas".
http://www.freedomware.us/microsoft/whyhate/
After Gates sold the new BASIC interpreter to MITS he left Harvard University, and went into business for himself with Allen as a partner. Allen was also an MITS employee at the time, which made his position rather interesting. Gates' departure from Harvard is shrouded in controversy: some say he dropped out, others say he was expelled for stealing computer time. Whatever the case may be, the fact is that Gates did most of the work on his BASIC version in a Harvard computer lab without having been authorized to use the (expensive) computer time needed for the project. Perhaps he did not really steal unauthorized computer capacity (which was a valuable commodity in those days) to develop his first commercially successful product. Yet he has never offered another explanation. He did however send his now-infamous "Open Letter To Hobbyists" to every major computer publication in February 1976, in which he decried the copying of Microsoft software by home computer hobbyists as simple theft.
In either case Bill Gates was on a computer system that he was not authorized to use when he implemented Altair Basic.
You've upset some lame ass mods who have never tried to earn a living by selling their own creations.
Hey losers, my employer pays me to create things which he sells. He only sells them if people find they are useful, and better, in some way, then the competition. If people just take those things instead of paying for them, he won't be able to pay me for the next design.
I mean, are you guys completely fucking stupid or what?
doing whatever they want.
If someone wants to make paintings by smearing their bodily waste on canvas, then they will probably not be able to make a good living at that. Or maybe they would, no accounting for taste.
My point being, just because you do something does not mean that it is moral for you to pass laws requiring other people to purchase only the fruits of your labor.
This is equivalent to the above artist getting laws passed that mandate not only that everyone must own one smeary masterwork, but that it must be produced by that artist alone.
I find people using the law to blungeon others into giving over their money to be morally wrong. The equivalent of theft of money.
Bad example.
W3.1 crashes twice a day
W95 crashed once a day (on average)
w98 SE crashes say once a week
NT4 crashes , hmm, not often enough to bother me
XP, SP2, seems pretty stable to me.
It seems to me that there is a clear progression in stability, even though the complexity of the code is increasing. The rate of progress may not be as fast as we like... but is demosntrably there.
As to your healthcare system, I agree. I don't think it is capitalism so much as a fundamental problem with the American psych that is at fault. So sue me...
It would appear that I have a privilege of being a member of one of the rarest of species: an insightful troll. I am not sure if I should be congratulating myself or consider surrendering to despair.
I disagree with your usage of this term, as well as wikipedia's usage. An ad-hominem would be something like, "Yeah, well who cares what an idiot like you thinks?". Instead, the examples you cite from Wikipedia are all cases of legitimately pointing out biases in your opponent that are likely to influence your opponent's position. And the GP post was pointing out hypocrisy in his opponent (Gates).
Yes, I agree. Piracy of commercial software is illegal and gives hobbyists a bad name. Nothing has changed here over 30 years. I think most open source enthusiasts (myself included) would rather people did not pirate commercial software.
You were at Lakeside, and are now here to comment? so, perhaps you are also one of the Lakesiders that BG hired into MS? in which case, perhaps you are familiar with of theft of intellectual property from Apple, used to help develop apps for the Mac? not "intellectual theft", actual theft of physical material. Since you clarified the time sharing issue, perhaps you like to clarify this one too?
However, he was wrong.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
Dear Bill,
If I have a lighted candle, and you light your candle from it, my room does not get any darker. Likewise, if you have a piece of software, and I make a copy of it using my materials and my equipment, you still have the software: it can be shared, without being diminished by the act of sharing.
Regardless of the amount of time and money {some of which was actually other people's time and money} you have invested in the production of your software, it was entirely your choice to do so. You were fully aware that your software could and would be shared, that it would in fact be physically impossible to prevent this, and yet you went ahead and spent time and money developing 8080 BASIC.
We did not ask you to create BASIC. You did, but this does not mean that you have some automatic right to get paid for it. Cut your losses and be glad of the $2 per hour you have earned. It is still $2 more than you deserve.
Programmers have to eat, but they do not have to program.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Who is Gate?
we decided early on that copyright infringement is a crime
You may have but the law didn't. It's only a civil offence for the most part.
And illegal doesn't mean wrong anyway. Plagiarism is wrong, but not necessarily even illegal. Plagiarism should be illegal in perpetuity, but people should have a right to copy. The degree of ability to learn from others is what distinguishes humans from other animals.
Bill is quoted as saying that APL would come out in 1979.
This might set a record for longest delayed software.
A slave harem of Eastern European women might have worked, alas it was apparently incompatible with the image Billy was trying to present of himself
No, like many geeks, he just prefers orientals. http://cryptome.cn/gates-birdseye.htm
He didn't 'steal' the Harvard PDP time either - the machine was allowed for unlimited student use. There was apparently no written policy concerning system use at the time. (There was after Harvard found out, asking to be cut in on profits from commercial development - note, not banning commercial development.)
It is also noted (by Hard Drive, not the most complimentary Bill biography) that as soon as Harvard asked Gates/Allen to stop, they did; they used timesharing services to develop Altair BASIC after that. So 'stealing' is a bit of a strong word for this - Bill's early activities are actually very similar to those of Stallman and the other MIT hackers. After all, computer time wants to be free.
It's important to bring context to the hobbyists letter, too, while it is amazingly overvitriolic - he was getting stiffed on a royalty agreement at the time, and the pirate version of Altair BASIC was actually a full-o-bugs prerelease version (remember, it was written on an emulator) which people were asking for Microsoft's support with. It's also interesting to look at the next Homebrew issue, which contains a "Ha-ha, your work's only worth $2 an hour" response to Gates by a guy who really should have known better. Guess childishness was rampant at the time.
In practice we don't trust people with dubbious moral authority about an issue and for good reason.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Somebody arguing something has a past, logical axioms don't.
When somebody makes an impecable logical argument you still has to question his motives and how he is arriving to that.
The argument may be correct, but we are entitled not to trust who is saying it.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
When I saw the headline in my RSS aggregator, I wondered who this "Gate" guy was. Then I realized that the editors were using new Microsoft VisualApostrophe.
Headline fix? Anyone?
Saying that "piracy" isn't an appropriate term is complete bull, to the point of being an even more propagandaish argument than the RIAA et. al. using "steal" or "theft" in its place.
Hyperbolic terms like piracy are a recent invention of holders of copyright, particularly for music or film, in order to deceive the public into a particular, and warped, line of thought. How am I spreading propaganda in suggesting that people think more freely about an important issue? BTW "copyright protection" is another confusing word you might want to avoid. Copyright laws were not created to protect authors. They are a gratuitous gesture made by society to encourage authors to share their works. Such gratutities are not necessary for software because the barrier to producing it is so low and the social need to share works is so high. Can you imagine a mathematician hiding his theorems so that his colleagues could not apprciate his results? The same is true of software, it is no different.
an ill wind that blows no good
The content is unsalealbe and unbuyable. The content is ideas in somebody else's head. Try to claim any ownership of the content after buying a copy of it and see how you are laughed all the way to you jail cell.
What you are buying is the service that facilitates your access to those ideas.
The device of copyright (right to copy, get it? Not right to buy) was devised precisely because ideas are completely different to physical objects.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Bill Gates's argument is/was fundamentally wrong because he assumes that software should be protected by the conventional copyright law.
:-)
The original copyright law grants author of the book (or other artistic expression) a limited (50 years) monopoly to produce copies of the book.
Free market functioning is based on the assumption that prices for goods and services are determined by the interaction of supply and demand, nobody owns the market and people are coming into transaction on their own free will and are free to enter and exit the marketplace on both supply and demand side.
On the other hand for the given book, no matter how good the book is there are always thousands of other good books in print. If price on a book is set much higher then for other books of the same kind most customers would not buy that overpriced book. Therefore, a limited monopoly for the book author can be granted by the society.
On the other hand, one does not have a choice whether to use Microsoft Windows or not. Although some applications exist for other platforms there is huge number of mission-critical applications in different fields that are only available for MS Windows.
Therefore conventional copyright law should not be applicable to software. The question whether a particular software item has a monopoly for these kind of software applications should be considered and the protection granted should set differently.
Then, there would be true free market, a.k.a capitalism for software, for now it's more like a feudal system, where there is one dominant virtual-land owner, serfs and the rebellion a.k.a GNU/OpenSource/Linux crowd.
Same reasoning (i.e. lack of free/open marketplace for both supply and demand side) can be applied to video contend production - i.e. more then 80% of the movies produced by one cartel (Hollywood), no real choice - therefore there shall be no copyright protection for Hollywood movies as well. At least not blanket copyright protection.
And the history of mankind shows that as soon as the society gets away from FARE playing that results in revolutions very quickly. I'm an optimist personally
Let the Source be with you.
Vassili Leonov
Things were supposed to be shared. That was the ENTIRE point of the club.. Remember it was a hobby club, not a business..
Gates came in and screwed it all up for the rest of us.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
During the Middle Ages (indeed, throughout most of human history) when somebody powerful wanted what you have so that he could have even more, he would just bop you on the head and take your stuff. Nowadays we call this a "transfer of wealth". All this random head-bopping became a problem for a lot of people, so some of them got together and invented the "rule of law". Now, the "rule of law" is expensive, so the newfound "rulers" (nowadays we call them "lawyers") had to create "taxation" in order pay for it. "Taxation", as we all know, is just a formalized, State-sponsored method of bopping somebody on the head and taking their stuff. Fortunately, we are now civilized so this rarely requires any actual head-bopping. Unfortunately, "taxation" only works for governments, so the corporations of the world came up with "intellectual property" for the express purpose of taxing our ideas, thereby once again bopping us on our heads and taking our stuff.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
For the sake of argument, lets say I have a CD from company X with the latest and greatest Operating System in the known universe. It sells for 45 bucks.
I am copying it now. OK, the copy is finished.
Now smart cookie, did my action diminished X's bank account total?
I rest my case.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
That's a valid line of reasoning. Say that in court, person A gives testimony that he saw person B killed person C. Person A turns out to be a convicted felon. Can he be trusted? Perhaps not. It's not irrelevant. On the other hand, if the assertion that person A is a criminal can't be backed up, then the ad-hominen attack would look invalid.
OK, that's a pretty irrelevant ad-hominem attack.
If the person is, indeed, addicted to nicotine (via smoking), then that's a pretty reasonable line of attack, don't you think? After all, people have a strong tendency to rationalize their actions, no matter how self-destructive.
Indeed! That's a very reasonable line of attack. It's obvious that tobacco companies have a conflict of interest here. Tho it's reprehensible, it's easy to imagine that a tobacco company cares about its own profits more than it cares about any health effects on its customers.
As demonstrated above, ad-hominem attacks are not all irrelevant. The point being made is that this person claims to have a principled position: intellectual (and other) property rights should be respected. But the force of that argument is diminished if it turns out the same person is OK with stealing from other people when it suits him. Where's the principle? It starts to look like: "I'm in favor of things which make me more money, and I'm against things which make me less money". Not quite as high-sounding a principle.
Of course not, hes above that sort of thing. Hes pure, and would never even think of taking advantage of anyone else.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
-- This
I've written an informative summary of the ascendance of MS on my blog.
I'm a gnu world man.
Ok, so hers the scenario Bill's talking about taken to extreme. I have a great idea for software product X. I then invest a year of my life and some of my friends time to code it. I then sell great idea X for $100. I sell one copy to on individual. That individual likes it so much he starts giving it away. Now 1 million people are using great idea X, but I've only made $100.
Bill argument is that this is wrong. The argument here seems to be the opposite, that this is ok. Someone please tell me how this is ok? And while your at it why I should ever waste my time on great idea Y and Z?
"Failure is not an option, it's part of the standard package"
Of course they also gloss over the fact that the reason hobbiests 'stole' the paper tapes of BASIC is that many had pre-paid and the release was over a year late. They had serious reason to believe that bootlegging the tapes was the only way they would ever recieve anything for their money. They also glossed over the minor detail that the tapes being distributed included community produced bug fixes.
Indeed, this letter does set the tone MS follows to this day. Steal from others, miss deadlines, complain bitterly when people feel entitled to a working product in return for their money.
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.
In answer to his questions above, apparently, the many many contributors to the Linux Kernel and the GNU system (RMS in particular) and on and on. Of course he also left out that the hobbiests he mentions were his only market. No businesses at the time were all that interested in BASIC or APL for microprocessors.
Another reasonable question would be if someone did to MS what Bill did to others back in the day, would it be understanding and allow them to work it off in trade or would they sue and prosecute? I suspect that had the unwilling 'donors' of computer time treated Bill the way MS would handle it, history would have been quite different.
Seen at:http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Legacy_Microsoft/alta ir-basic.html
e tter-to-hobbyists.html, among other places.
From rick Sat Jun 1 23:01:17 2002
Date: Sat, 1 Jun 2002 23:01:17 -0700
To: Peter Belew (peterbe@sonic.net)
Cc: jtsmoore@pacificnet.net, SlugLug (sluglug@sluglug.ucsc.edu)
Subject: Re: [SlugLUG] RevolutionOS showing
User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.27
deleted.......
But rather than dwell on all that, I thought I'd address this bit about Bill Gates's "Open Letter to Hobbyists",[1] which Peter Belew dragged into the discussion.
Peter, I happen to be one of the old-timers, too, and my memory is perhaps a little better than yours. The letter was not to the Homebrew Computer Club (of which I was a member at the time), but rather to a the MITS Altair Users' Newsletter, in New Mexico. David Bunnell was then newsletter editor, and he lobbed a copy to us at the Homebrew club, among other people. Which is how we got it. (And this was in early 1976, not 1977.)
The letter caused quite a flap. For one thing, this complaint from the General Partner of "Micro-Soft" over in Albuquerque wasn't entirely honest. The software in question had been created on a taxpayer-subsidised PDP-10 (running an 8080 emulator) at Harvard, and also there was very strong, reasonable suspicion that Gates, Allen, and Davidoff had "borrowed" from several other people's BASIC inplementations without their authors' permission.
Also, and less relevantly, Micro-Soft was already getting a reputation for questionable business deals: If you were buying MITS dodgy boards, Micro-Soft's Altair BASIC was $150. If not, the same product was $500, which was a hell of lot in those days. Which was not a good reason to misappropriate it, although the questionable ancestry of Micro-Soft's 4kB interpreter arguably was.
deleted.........
[1] Readable at http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Legacy_Microsoft/open-l
[2] Nitpickers have noted that the concept was not unknown in parts of the mainframe world. But it was an unwelcome surprise to microcomputerists.
Poor guy... All these years and he's still not happy!
Fortunately, we decided early on that copyright infringement is a crime, so there's not much guess work involved here: copying something that you did not create without a license allowing you to do so is illegal. It's not stealing, because theft deprives the owner of property, but it is still illegal.
That is true today, but it is perfectly proper to deliberate changing those laws. To argue that the laws as they stand are unjust or that different laws would be better is not mincing words. For better or worse, the one and only absolute right a citizen has to challenge the constitutionality of a law is to break that law and present his argumen ts in court. Everything else is just a suggestion that can be freely ignored.
In esscence, copyright is a quick and dirty legal hack which was never really satisfactory to those who conceived it. Considerable evidence suggests that recent changes to copyright laws (especially the way it keeps getting extended) are not motivated at all by making it a more satisfactory solution to the question of how to promote progress in the useful arts and science. It could even be argued that applying new extensions to copyright law to existing works constitutes an ex post facto law.
It is also quite proper to question the arguments of MS, *AA, etc. Will changes favorable to them REALLY promote progress? Will those changes really provide incentive to the creators of the works? For example, what would the consequences be if copyrights and patents could ONLY be granted to and held by a natural person who directly contributed to the work's creation? (since a legal fiction has no mind with which to create anything).
Perhaps copyright law should be specifically limited to commerce? Certainly many people seem to agree with that idea. In fact, many consider it so blindingly obvious that they feel certain current law ALREADY is that way.
None of this is mincing words.
I think msft's business practices are deplorable. I love F/OSS and use debian as my main desktop.
But, in this particular letter, gates is right. All he is saying is that it's not okay to steal software, anymore than it's okay to steal hardware.
If you don't like Walmart's business practices: does that make it okay to shoplift at walmart?
Go ahead and hate msft all you want, but in this particular case, bill gates is exactly right.
Are you insane? A car has a finite lifespan and costs real money to maintain. If people "borrow" it all the time I am deprived of something very tangible.
I don't feel like I'm making excuses with regards to copying... I know it's not legal, but it doesn't feel wrong. All of the in-house programming I did for the last company I worked at I got paid for... but if that code was actually sold, I'd feel weird getting money for it.
Since the code was fairly specific to our own web apps, there was no reason to release it (that, and maybe for potential security reasons), but I've taken the code with me (which is technically the property of that company) and wouldn't feel wronged if anyone got the code for free. My former bosses and coworkers (whom I developed the code with) know that I have it, and are ok with that.
I would feel wronged if my code was 'stolen' and credited to someone else, which is what I take the gist of open source software to be: copy it, use it, learn from it, add to it, but please give credit where it's due.
The people behind all the commercial apps and games should be paid for what they do, but there's such a big separation between the money someone pays for Windows and the paycheck of a single Microsoft employee. Again, this doesn't make software piracy a 'right', but it makes it easier to gloss over the fact that it's not legal.
LegendMUD
Lesson #1:
>> Don't correct people, unless you know what the hell you are talking about.
>
> It appears that you also missed a comma in the above quote, I took the liberty of adding it.
You took the liberty of adding a comma incorrectly. Here's the comma lesson of the day for you. "Information that is unnecessary to the meaning of the sentence must be set off and enclosed by commas. If the information is necessary, no commas should be used." Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma_(punctuation)
The phrase "unless you know what the hell you are talking about" is necessary to the meaning of the sentence so the comma you added is incorrect.
Lesson #2:
>> And, by the way, I think "slashdot" is spelled with an "sl", not an "sh".
>
> Actually, I believe it would be:
>
> And, by the way, I think "slashdot" is spelled with a "sl", not a "sh".
Wrong again.
The rule here is to use "an" before any word that starts with a vowel sound, such as "an hour." Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%2C_an
The word fragment "sl" is pronounced "ess-el," thus the use of "an" is correct.
To recap, don't correct people unless you know what the hell you are talking about. (Note the correct use of the comma.)
I really wanted to change my sig to something witty, but all I could come up with is this.
> Has it occured to you that, perhaps the system worked and Windows was the best operating system for the masses?
ROFL! That's the best one I've heard in weeks!!!
(...goes back to playing with Mac OS X Tiger...)
If you copy my music, I still have my music. It you use my CPU cycles and can't use them.
In a free society, we all have the right to dictate the terms under which we provide something, be it labor, material goods, information, or art. And it is the choice of the general public if they wish to agree to your terms and use your offering, or go somewhere else. If you want to give it away, it's your right. If you want to charge for it, it is also your right. If you charge for something and I take it without compensation, that is theft. No matter what is taken, or how "tangible" someone else deems it, it is still theft. Those who argue against this simple truth are just trying to make themselves feel better for stealing the works (or property) of others.
Simple example: When you got hired at your current job, you agreed to work for a certain amount of money. You go to work one day and your boss says "Well, I'm not going to pay you for your work anymore. I think you should work for free." Do you continue to work for him? No. Do you expect to be paid for the hours you worked before the agreement changed? Yes.
My ending statement is this: If you don't like Bill Gates, don't buy his products. If you don't like the terms under which Microsoft expects you to use their products, don't use them. It doesn't matter if you dislike the owner of the property, you have to agree to their terms if you decide to use their property. You wouldn't like it if I just walked into your house and ate your food and talked to my friends on your telephone. Treat others as you would like to have yourself treated.
You're absolutely right. Don't mistake me for a champion of copyright. If you want to get the laws changed, more power to you. However, that doesn't change the fact that at the moment copying things you don't have a license to copy is illegal. I mean, that's a fact. That has nothing to do with whether you ought to do it or not, or even whether it's moral or not. For example, I don't think downloading music is immoral, because I've looked at the situation and feel that the RIAA actually benefit quite a bit from so-called "piracy", in exactly the same way that Microsoft has benefited greatly from the piracy that has given Windows a de facto monopoly in the OS market.
On the other hand, I think that if I write a novel, for example, and you copy it and publish it under your own name, pretending that you're the author, and manage to make a living that way, all while in the process depriving me of my glory (I can't very well go publish exactly the same book after you've published, can I) I think that's completely immoral.
Both of these, as it stands, are illegal. This is why I agree with Richard Stallman's points in "Copyright and Globalization in the Age of Computer Networks", where he essentially says that copyright needs a serious overhaul. I don't think it should be done away with completely, but I think different circumstances ought to be treated differently.
But my original point wasn't about what I think, it was about a number of points that I think most people can agree with.
Are you on the rag today or what?
"One thing you 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?"
Yet, isn't this what Linux and open source is all about ? The quote strikes me as yet another completely false prophecy, along the lines of computers won't ever use more than one meg of ram.
In fact at the time of writing wasn't Bekeley UNIX being distributed for free and it far, far, far, exceeded BASIC ! To be fair, however, I guess a lot of the Berkely developers were being paid by universities and weren't on the open market like Bill...
Brings back memories this does. I hope someone sends a copy to the RIAA.
The theory goes that people apparently steal from you and you get a commercially successful product.....Do people (illegally) copy and use bad software? Do people (illegally) copy and listen to bad music?
If you're happy with what you use/hear you buy in. Maybe eventually, but you buy in with money or kudos, whichever is appropriate, or go elsewhere. IBM bought in. Not sure what this steam is about guys.
PaulGet some perspective and Google "bill gates philanthroper". Take a deep breath, allowing yourself to absorb the fact that for all of your preachyness of his evil ways you've done shit in comparison for the good of software, and the world's most needy.
On the other hand, I think that if I write a novel, for example, and you copy it and publish it under your own name, pretending that you're the author, and manage to make a living that way, all while in the process depriving me of my glory (I can't very well go publish exactly the same book after you've published, can I) I think that's completely immoral.
That would be plagiarism. IMHO a much more serious offense than mere copyright violation.
More generally, I agree that copyright should not simply be abolished, but should be radically altered, starting with restoration of a reasonable length of time.
Further, The loophole of using trademarks intrinsic to a work to effectively extend copyright should be abolished. Work for hire should be considerably narrowed, perhaps to the point that a work for hire simply grants an exclusive license rather than the copyright itself.
Media conversion should be explicitly permitted and any DRM preventing that declared illegal. If for no other reason, it endangers the availability of the work once copyright expires. That is, the granting of copyright also creates a duty to preserve the work for the public domain.
Finally, there should be a publish or perish clause. That is, once new licenced copies become unavailable for a reasonably short period for any reason (including lack of consumer interest), the work reverts to public domain to assure it's continued availability. The fact that existing copyright law can be used to make a work unavailable (acting directly against it's intent) is the most obvious failure. In the case of a work for hire, the unavailabliity will merely terminate the exclusive license and give the actual author a reasonable period to make the work available by another means.
'Automatic' copyright should be for a fairly short period of time. Full duration should require registration so that a work doesn't become unavailable due to inability to locate the author to discuss licensing. Failure to register a copyright may be taken as lack of interest on the author's part.
An author may absolve himself of all further duties to preserve or publish ONLY by declaring the work to be public domain.
Note that a work being in the public domain does not in any way absolve the duty to properly credit the work's author.
As for what the law is now, yes, it is what it is. However, civil disobediance is a well recognized means to protest a law, and some might go so far as to consider it the duty of any citizen.
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. — Dorothy Parker
Why do you maintain it? Why not just take the next car?
Hint: part of the answer is that you have 'property rights'.