Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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!
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
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.
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.
"I've done all this work and you owe me." Maybe he still thinks that way
Do you feel that way after you do work? I know I do. Until that check clears, somebody definitely owes me for making computers do things for them that they themselves couldn't or didn't do. Like Bill, I'd be especially tweeked if someone else was cashing in on it (my work) instead.
I'm glad for you that you can do the work you want with your waking hours, and not worry about exchanging that time for the value (cash) with which you put a roof over your head or eat, but that's not how it is for most people. Not most artists, writers, architects, engineers, or software developers. Congratulations on whatever you did do to become financially independent from having to exchange work for money. Um, unless you just inherited it, in which case, congratulations for just being lucky.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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.
Exactly. That was the point. It's that simple. That's what libre software is for. The rest of your post is useless fluff that I didn't quite understand.
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?
However, he was wrong.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
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.
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.