30th Anniversary of Gates' Letter to HCC 544
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."
Last line of his letter... (Score:0, Informative)
Instead, he ended up hiring 50,000 of them and deluged the commercial market with crappy software.
Oh well, at least he acheived the deluge part.
You owe me! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Your ad hominem argument... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Your ad hominem argument... (Score:2, Informative)
The OP didn't challenge the Gate's argument. He implied that gates is a hypocrite
and his allegory, if true, substantiates and validates that claim.
To redeem yourself, please tell us which logical fallacy did your argument use?
Was it argumentum astroturfus by any chance?
Re:You owe me! (Score:3, Informative)
smash.
There was a reply to the letter in the next issue (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Great Shashdot grammar, as usual (Score:2, Informative)
In reply to the grand parent post it is actually a spelling mistake not a grammer mistake
30 Years Later, Bill Has His Answer (Score:5, Informative)
- 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.
compare with stallman... (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:30 Years Later, Bill Has His Answer (Score:3, Informative)
Linus Torvalds was a college student when he wrote Linux.
Marc Andreesen was a college student when he wrote Netscape.
Tridge was an administrative employee of Australian National University when he wrote Samba. He later went on to teach & lecture, but that was after he reverse engineered SMB.
Of Larry Wall, I'm not entirely certain, however given his training is as a linguist, I doubt any employer in that field was interested in underwriting Perl.
WHOA! Read the last words of that letter! (Score:3, Informative)
With the RIAA suing so many people over piracy, i think i'll print that letter and put it in a golden frame
Re:What is the significance of this letter? (Score:2, Informative)
Hobbyists didn't develop enterprise grade software. They just got the ball rolling. Linux is written by professionals, for the most part. They get paid either by the companies they work for or through donations to groups like OSDL.
Re:What is the significance of this letter? (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:Reselling? (Score:4, Informative)
Yes. It wasn't a criminal offense back then. Copyright was strictly a civil issue, like patent infringement is today. Criminal copyright penalties were introduced for film and sound recordings in 1982, and for everything else in 1992. Thirty years ago, it wasn't even clear that computer programs should be copyrightable at all. There was considerable discussion over this, and prominent authors argued against it. [digital-law-online.info]
Byte Magazine, in the early days, ran full page ads for a company called "Pirate's Harbor". "Locksmith", a tool for breaking copy protection, was a successsful commercial product.
Re:... says the guy who stole gobs of PDP-10 time (Score:5, Informative)
I cannot personally vouch for the veracity of Gates' early history provided at this site [vt.edu] 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.
Re:Because APL was a popular interpreted language (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:His letter is interesting. (Score:3, Informative)
"The Altair was featured on the cover of Popular Electronics for January 1975. It was the world's first mass-produced personal computer kit, as well as the first computer to use an Intel 8080 processor."
Re:The right to piracy (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Great Slashdot grammar, as usual (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:... says the guy who stole gobs of PDP-10 time (Score:3, Informative)
"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.
Re:Attitude hasn't changed much (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Your ad hominem argument... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Attitude hasn't changed much (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Attitude hasn't changed much (Score:3, Informative)
While it is technically true, Adam Smith's argument was that the merit part is a side-effect of the mechanisms of the free marketplace and that is that side-effect which guides unwitting paticipants towards progress and improvement of their society (a guiding process he named "An Invisible Hand") which is the true function and the purpose of the system.
Bill Gates expelled for stealing computer time (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.mackido.com/History/Gates_a_Genius.htm
Bill Gates (after dropping out of college) and a friend (Paul Allen) started making software (Mid 70's). The first thing they did was steal (uh, borrow?) some computer time from a college and they implemented Basic (a Language) for the Altair Computer (made by MITS). Basic had been around for many years before Bill implemented a version of it . They did provide a service, but it is not that impressive technically to take public domain code from one machine and port it to another. Yawn. It was also very questionable (ethically) to sell a language who's definition was in public domain, and develop it on computer time borrowed from a school. But I don't think ethics bother Bill Gates too much -- and in the over all scheme of things, this was one of the lesser of the "moral gray areas".
http://www.freedomware.us/microsoft/whyhate/ [freedomware.us]
After Gates sold the new BASIC interpreter to MITS he left Harvard University, and went into business for himself with Allen as a partner. Allen was also an MITS employee at the time, which made his position rather interesting. Gates' departure from Harvard is shrouded in controversy: some say he dropped out, others say he was expelled for stealing computer time. Whatever the case may be, the fact is that Gates did most of the work on his BASIC version in a Harvard computer lab without having been authorized to use the (expensive) computer time needed for the project. Perhaps he did not really steal unauthorized computer capacity (which was a valuable commodity in those days) to develop his first commercially successful product. Yet he has never offered another explanation. He did however send his now-infamous "Open Letter To Hobbyists" to every major computer publication in February 1976, in which he decried the copying of Microsoft software by home computer hobbyists as simple theft.
In either case Bill Gates was on a computer system that he was not authorized to use when he implemented Altair Basic.
I disagree with use of "ad hominem" (Score:3, Informative)
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).