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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."
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.
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.
He still hates casual software piracy; the only difference is now he has much more influence...
This is a bad thing? I didn't realise software piracy was some kind of fundamental right. Nor did I realise that, you know, not liking software piracy made you some kind of bully.
You didn't explicitly say that, no, but that's the impression I got.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
OK, I'm not implying that software piracy is a good thing. If it's not free, then you should pay for it, to show respect to the people who worked hard to produce the software.
But also, Bill Gates was definitely much rougher in the letter than he needed to be to get his point across, which is why it is difficult to feel sympathetic to his cause. The perception of him as a "bully" is mostly because of the tone of the letter.
My sig is permanently on strike.
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 hope you realise that it shows that something is profoundly wrong with America. Since the capitalist system is supposed to be a meritocracy, whereby individual, haphazard transactions of consumers magically even out over time to reward contributors in direct proportion to their contributions (a.k.a. The Invisible Hand), this can only be construded as a total and complete failure of the capitalist system. Neither Bill Gates nor Paul Allen did ivented anything novel or unique, they merely happened to be, by happy circumstance at the right place and knew the right people. Add to it the supremely tenacious and boundless selfish greed of Gates and the rest is history. Unless of course you are going to suggest that a progression of work of others these two appropriated over time and an 8080 rendition of BASIC (a language neither of those two invented) was worth all those untold billions.
They may have been mediocre programmers, but they were shrewd, lucky and willing to take risk and that is what makes you successful in a capitalist system.
Shrewd? Bill was an efficient abuser of others and quick to exploit any disadvantages, like say, a conscience, they might have had for his profit. I guess you could call that "shrewd" although I have more choice words for it. Lucky? Certainly. But if luck is to be the cornerstone of the capitalist system then it is simply feudalism in a fancy dress. Risk? You gotta be kidding. We are talking about a spoiled, already rich brat whose entire early operation was underwritten (foolishly) by IBM.
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.
At the time nobody took seriously the idea that someone should be paid for software. We didn't pay for what was on the disk, we paid for the disk. Once we owned the disk, we felt anything on it was ours. The position of people like Bill Gates was very different, and he had to make a strong statement to get his point across.
What competitors? I am not sure if you are familiar with the history of this but the "success" of Microsoft is a result of confluence of several factors: a) IBM's irrational decision to tie its fortunes to Microsoft's on an exclusive basis, b) general public's lack of understanding of principles of computing, leading it to treat everything and anything PC-related as a brand-new, never before heard of discovery, never you mind not realizing that Microsoft was doing them great disservice by reinventing 20 year-old principles, poorly and c) Bill's ability to create a vendor lock in, by unethical and morally repugnant manouvers both legal and technical. One leading to exclusions of all competitors by forming essentially a protection racket with major vendors and the other by creating great obstacles for users and developers should they consider a competing product. This is a text book example of failure of capitalism, the dangers of trusts and cartels and the limitations of the contribution-reward scheme when the consumers are deprived of sufficient information to make an informed purchase.
Jealous is not the word. Try "dismayed at the great deficiencies of society" is more like it. My argument is not that either I or more likely one of those far more brilliant coders I spoke of should have replaced Gates. My point is that noone, ever should have been in Gate's today's position as competition should have established a vast network of suppliers cooperating within common standards based on the quality of their work. In such a scenario, each of these people would have his/her niche and the society would be better of for being far more egalitarian, just and ended up having much greater choice and strong scientific progress instead of what we have now. I am not sure if your realise this but Microsoft has set the computing industry back 50 years. Only now its products are beginning to feature ability to use terminals and begin to approach true mutitasking and multiuser functions. If you wait a few more years, we will have the 1960s OS virtualization coming back as a built-in feature. I don't know about you but I find the way things unfolded rather sad and tragic.