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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.
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.
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.
That would be a nice form post (especially on slashdot), except in this case Bill Gates' argument is intimately tied to him. He argues about how his company has made an investment and deserves renumeration. When $40,000 of that investment is in fact stolen from someone else, why does he deserve to be paid ?
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
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. --
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.
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.