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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."
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....
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?
...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.
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.
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
Because successfull thiefs have a tendency to become nobles.. worked in the middleages.. works now.
"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."
Yeah, at least when Stallman wasted MIT's resources on his crusade, he was consistent, since he believes things should be shared, whether or not the owner agrees.
Vote for Pedro
As comprehensive, eloquent, well-researched, logical, meticulously detailed responses go, this one is a doozie.
Before people arrive with torches to burn the grammar nazi....
Without posts like this, in about 20 more years any random collection of keystrokes will express some sort of valid English thought.
I no u c wat I m3an.
Uh-oh, someone needs to call Oracle, Computer Associates, Symantec, Apple Computer, Corel, Novell, IBM, PeopleSoft, Siebel, SAP, Sage, Compuware and all the other thousands of software companies in the planet and tell them that they are going to "sink in red ink".
Oh, and someone call, um, what's their name... ah, I forget. They're in Redmond. They'll want to know about this too.
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.
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. ;)
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.
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.
-- This