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."
Already a hypocrite 30 years ago! (Score:3, Interesting)
Right back atcha! (Score:5, Interesting)
Below is a reply in the subsequent issue [digibarn.com] 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.
Revenge of the Non-Nerds (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:... says the guy who stole gobs of PDP-10 time (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Attitude hasn't changed much (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Some Reading Material For You. (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [kmfms.com]. 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.
Re:compare with stallman... (Score:2, Interesting)
Gates, on the other hand, is generally only admired because he made so much money - his software is generally regarded as sloppy.
Yeap, I'd love to have a ton of money, but I'd rather be in the league of Stallman and the like (though sadly, I'm not even close - sigh), as then my principles let me sleep at night.
Re:... says the guy who stole gobs of PDP-10 time (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:... says the guy who stole gobs of PDP-10 time (Score:4, Interesting)
Bill's lesson learned: to charge per CPU shipped (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Who wrote the letter? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Your ad hominem argument... (Score:1, Interesting)
Where did gates get his basic from? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
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[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.
Re:Your ad hominem argument... (Score:3, Interesting)
This is ridiculous. How can you compare data duplication to theft? It may make the original copy less valuable, but so does opening a new shoestore next to a shoestore you run. Devaluation is not theft, nor is duplication.