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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?
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.
...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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, it is actually Gates'
;-)
In reply to the grand parent post it is actually a spelling mistake not a grammer mistake
"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
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
"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
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.
"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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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. ;)
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.
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.
My recollection was that MS was selling Fortran for CP/M in 1979 and there were hooks to make use of the AMD 9511/9512 numeric processors. Some of the oddities of the L80 linker were due from the support for Fortran-80. Development on F80 stopped in 1982.
The UCSD P-system had both a Pascal and Fortran compiler - though run-time speed was slow. DR had Pascal MT+ - also available with speed programming package (first edition IDE).
FWIW, the first MS Fortran compiler (v2.02, first avialable 4 to 5 months after the PC) for the IBM PC was a POS - the first really decent one was v3.10 which came out late 1983. The Pascal compilers were a bit better - MS was doing a lot of development in Pascal - usually cross-compiled from a VAX. The first MS C compiler was a repackaged Lattice compiler.
The use of "piracy" in the context of copyright infringement is well established. In fact, this meaning has been around for about half the life of the word itself. The OED has dates to 1552 for pirate meaning the Blackbeard type and 1771 for copyright infringement. If you look at Pirate, the dates are 1387 and 1668 respectively -- there the latter definition has been around for almost 30 years MORE than the life of the word.
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.
In most countries copying software is not a crime.
Source?
Near as I can tell, even if this isn't true, well over half the population of the world is in a country that provides software copyright protection. The distinction grows even more if you count the number of people with access to computers.
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.
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.
In my defense, the slashdot editors extended what I wrote and took out some things. Half of what appeared is not stuff that I wrote.
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"
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.
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).
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.
-- This
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.
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.