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."
Since there was no incentive for Micro-Soft to write good software, they haven't since that time.
ed
That's a joke, son.
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?
...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.
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.
Absolutely, but there shouldn't be blanket permission to prevent societies evolution to your gain. This was the original idea of copyright - the holder could make money out of their invention/creation for a "reasonable" period of time, then the content fell back into the public domain.
Also, once something is in the public domain, it should be there for all. Disney has made a fortune by taking out-of-copyright material (Cinderella, Pooh, Snow White), reworking it, then throwing lawyers at everybody who attempts to use the original material.
Finally, people who want to put their creations "conditionally" into the public domain (eg - GPL) should be protected. Although they aren't motivated by money, to see somebody else get rich by using your work (outside the rules) is a different kettle of fish.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
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!
If the OP were arguing that the hobbyists were not stealing, yes, that would be an ad hominem argument. His point, however, is that Bill Gates is a hypocrite. The fact that he himself stole, to develop the very product he was pointing out others should not steal, makes him one.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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.
His actual argument, like all those wishing to own and trade "intellectual property" disintegrates upon the examination of what it is that they wish to trade and then accuse others of stealing. Information is not, under any possible definition that can withstand even a most cursory test of logic, an object which can be traded. All principles of mercantile trade and also that of capitalism which is built on that trade are constructed upon the premise that the only things valid for trade are either physical (private property) or labour. An attemt to use law to redefine esoterical thought representations and large numbers into physical objects are not only morally repugnant but also a dire warning, a clear demonstration that the legal system is dangerously out of control and no longer subject to rules of decency and logic.
That is also a wholly independent and separate issue of that of how to reward artists and inventors for their creative works. To which a question many answers exist which do not require a totalitarian regime and a wholesale crippling of our freedoms to accomplish. However those who are enemies of those freedoms as they see them in the way of their boundless greed and therefore those who our mortal enemies, enemies of the human kind, enemies like Bill Gates or the so-called "music industry", would stop at nothing in order to use perversions of law to reap "rewards" so out of proportion with their contributions that soon their fortunes exceed that of 99% of their fellow citizens individually and probably good 30% of global population combined. There is no possible justification for that state of affairs, other then out-of control rule of greed and wholesale subjegations of law and the society to it.
The person making the argument is a completely irrelevant aspect of the argument itself.
That's true only in a very limited sense. Logicians love to quote clear examples of logical and then claim that their examples apply to real arguments (ironically, this is itself an example of fallacious argumentation -- it's a straw man.) In the real world, the relationship between the argument and the person making the argument is a lot more complex. If the person making the argument has a known bias or pattern of behavior which may be affected by the outcome of the debate, it is entirely logical, and not at all fallacious, to take this into account when interpreting his words.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
"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. --
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.
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.
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.
He argues about how his company has made an investment and deserves renumeration.
All right, leaving ad hominem attacks aside for the benefit of those who commented about that previously, let's point out the fallacy in the argument, independent of Gates' character:
Just because you make an investment does not mean that you "deserve" remuneration, at least not in any meaningful sense that creates an obligation in anyone else. My dad, for example, invested in several stocks of companies that went belly up. While we can argue that he "deserved" remuneration because of his investment (after all, think of the children! which at the time would have been me and my brother), the fact is that his stocks turned into toilet paper, and his investment didn't somehow create a magic obligation on the part of the public to see to it that he got his "remuneration" regardless of whether or not there were an actual market for what the company did.
So, if nobody wants what you're selling, you may "deserve" to recoup your investment, but nobody is obligated to give it to you. I further contend that in that case it's not right to try to manipulate the market through coercive laws in order to _make_ a market that gives you your "deserved" "remuneration."
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
This is starting to get bland and pedantic, but there is a distinction to be made. In Gates' letter he makes two arguments. One is the general argument that developers deserve to get paid ("What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?"), and the other is that he specifically deserves to be paid ("The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000."). Maybe we are talking about two different things ? I think the fact that he stole that $40,000 of computer time invalidates the latter. His general argument still stands. I even supported it in a another post.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
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.
Sigh. I'm trying to point out that a premise Gates used ($40,000 of invested computer time) does not apply (since he stole it and thus did not "invest" it). Gates' own argument refers to himself, so I don't see how people are claiming "it doesn't matter who makes the argument". If an innocent person makes the argument "I am innocent because of these facts" and a guilty person says the same thing, are you going to say the argument is true in the second case as well ? The facts do not apply to the second person, so his argument his non-sequitur.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
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.
That is merely your preception or perhaps your intent. In fact you do pay only for the media and the processing of it. Information simply has no attributes which would make a transaction of its sale possible.
Yes, once the copyright expires. I buy lots of Shakespeare plays - but I can reproduce Shakespeare's insight as much as I please. Even under copyright, I can tranfer what I learned from the books to others, as long as I don't copy the text outright.
Then what is the difference between the information before the expiration of the copyright and after? Does it change qualities? Does it become a different thing? Or is it perhaps that some misguided people thought that by dictating conditions of what you can do with the thing you supposedly purchased after its sale (thus violating another of basic tenets of mercantile society) is a good way to encourage artists to produce more? And that this scheme, in addition to rewarding distributors and marketers of plastic disks far more then the artists, produces wee little side effect: that any logically consistent attempt to enforce this must result in one form of totalitarian repression or another? "copying the text outright"? Didn't you do so by reading it? Did not the CD player copy the data and then the amplifier, the speakers, the air particles and finaly your ears do so? Where is a differnce between "copying outright" and "orally transmitting it"? By hand signals? Etc and so on. And then of course onto more advanced questions like "what exactly is the information itself which is so protected?" A series of ink blots on paper? Electrons in neural pathways? Dimples in plastic? What exactly?
No. I pay for the creation of the work.
No you don't. Vast majority of the money goes to mass marketers, distributors, manipulators and gate keepers of the information. The artist receives a mere fraction of that money, and ironically, is rarely the "owner" of his own work. You are simply falling a victim to another aspect of this odious scam, that is the purposeful conflation of the attempts of turning information into private property and that of providing means of rewarding artists or scientists for their labour. In fact these two are separate and wholly independent issues. What the book and CD-sales model is attempting to do is to treat the process as if all creative activities were one and the same with assembly line production of mass market goods. It is the "idea as a plastic widget" model. The resulting effect is that of the artists receiving less in compensation for their effort then that under various patronage and pay for performance schemes of the past while some forms of "art" (read: kitsch) are manipulated and abused to create "products" by means of shameless marketing.
would rather not pay for the compilation - but even if that were free, I would voluntarily pay people who provide me with unique or interesting information.
That system is called patronage and is indeed a sane aproach. But you would be paying for the labour of producing the information, not the information itself as it has no possible way of being traded. It is simply so due to its fundamental nature.
I am in favor of all methods of unlinking these, so I can give more money to people who create intellectual value, rather than those who merely package it.
The problem is not unlinking the two, which happens regardless of the wishes of the stakeholders, and is merely a result of the nature of information. The problems is that an attempt to enforce a "mass market widget" model of renumeration to artists leads inevietably, logically and unavoidably to totalitarian measures. There is simply no other way to defeat the fu