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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....
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.
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?
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.
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.
"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
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
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.
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.
As comprehensive, eloquent, well-researched, logical, meticulously detailed responses go, this one is a doozie.
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...
Difference to whom?
Him? No, he believes in software ownership, and always has.
You? Probably yes, because pirating software nowadays can have more negative consequences than it use too... especially because software/technology producers have more influence today.
Personally, I find supporting open-source software much more rewarding than downloading a pirated copy of whatever. For starters, there's a lot of excellent OSS out there nowadays and participating in it, even if only as a user, helps it mature further. Plus, I believe that if someone wants you to pay for something they've created (or bought the rights too) then you must respect their wishes.
IMO, pirated software is for chumps. If you want a particular piece of retail software, then pay for it, otherwise grow some balls and support OSS... but please don't support pirating software and OSS too, it does neither camps of opinion any good.
Is it significant because it's "the first time" someone argued that software ought to be paid for like a shrinkwrapped product?
Yes.
Did this letter have any effect at all?
It changed the very conception of intellectual property. Anybody who grew up in the 80s or later will never really understand the latter, but things used to be very, very different.
Didn't Gates & Co. just figure out they should sell to businesses instead of hobbyists?
No, no, no. Gates had just figured out that they should sell to hobbyists instead of giving it to businesses like the big boys did.
The hobbyists didn't necessarily see why they should have to pay for software that ought to have just come with the computer, because that's what software did.
This letter turned the world upsidedown.
KFG
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I am afraid that "reputation" is no way a thing that you can risk in business, other in extreme cases of graft or failure so great that it becomes common knowledge of every layman. Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom is an example of that rare case. Bill Gates was never ever in a position to risk anything in that regard. Should his venture fail, he had a vast multitude of others opened to him, and I know it from personal experience that the business community's memory is shorter than that of a particularly forgetful goldfish. And when you add to this the fact that IBM (in an error that should never be forgoten) has essentially provided their then rather substantial resources in backing Microsoft's venture, and even managed to tie their own to his, leaving themselves no choice but to assist him. As far as Gates was concerned, there was no risk involved, ever. Then, once he had a fortune so substantial that a loong series of mistakes was not even able to make a dent in it, the rest of the "risk" argument is not only moot but rather comical.
I just hate when I hear fellow geeks blast him for being a shitty programmer. It took more than BASIC donkeys to make Microsoft what it is.
He actually is not that good. I had the opportunity to examine his early work in some detail and it was competent, to a degree, but nothing extraordinary for the time it was written. I know programmers who were far more talented and inspired at that time then Gates could ever dream of, doing similar things but whose far superior work is now not even a history footnote. Gate's only strengh was his unrelenting self-centered pursuit of money and power by legal manouvers (inspired by his father who was a high-powered lawyer), and on that front he was indeed rather effective.
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.