Regarding the commercial BASIC project mentioned in this letter - Gates facilitated non-student Allen coming onto the Harvard campus, to use a computer they did not have permission to use for their commercial project. The computer they were using without authorization was one which was being used by the US military. Like Mark Zuckerberg in later years, Gates was called up before the Harvard Ad board for this.<p>From Paul Allen's book "Idea Man" -<p>"Returning to Aiken late one night after a fast-food run, we were stopped by the campus police and asked for our IDs...Harvard split the computer’s maintenance costs with the U.S. Defense Department, based on usage. I’d relied on Bill’s password account for my work on the simulator, which ate a lot of processor time. When the January bills came due, Harvard’s share was up conspicuously, with one student the prime culprit: William Henry Gates III. (he appeared before the university’s administrative board that summer...)"
My software title "FileSearchEX" is so pirated that I can no longer continue to work on it full time. Indeed, search engines show more "free crack here" links than legitimate ones. Imagine going to the supermarket and having "free" eggs next to the $5 carton ... which would you choose? I know what 90% of them go with.
<i>> "Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?"</i><p>Yes who can do professional interpreters for free. Guido van Rossum could not possible put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, and document his product for free.<p>This is after all what this letter is about. An interpreter for a programming language, and the complain is about hobbyist and other non-commercial entities using it without paying money for it.
I think that in the long run, Microsoft profited from piracy. My rationale is that piracy gave a market advantage to the OS with the widest selection of "free" software. So long as folks could copy MS-DOS and Windows software from their workplace, there was little incentive to consider any other OS.
From the letter:<p>*> Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share."<p>I'll have to dig around but I recall reading a few articles about 60%+ windows OS being pirated, this number is much lower in US and other developed markets, but is as high as 93% in some[0].<p>[0] <a href="http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_sof_pir_rat-crime-software-piracy-rate" rel="nofollow">http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_sof_pir_rat-crime-soft...</a><p>edit: site seems to be unavailable. Link @ archive.org:<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20100316174220/http://www.cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/gates1976.html" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20100316174220/http://www.cryptn...</a>
Why was Gates hectoring the hobbyists?<p>1. The hobbyists had a culture of freely sharing code, which Gates was trying to break up (now known as Linux, Github, C)<p>2. Software was about 5 years away from Congress making software definitely copyrightable in the US [1] (there had been some court decisions)<p>1. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_copyright" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_copyright</a>
Fascinating write-up which puts the economics of proprietary vs open source in full view. Gates was unhappy in the letter because it was hard to make money charging license fees in arrears. In my business, I charge for a lot of development up front.<p>The lesson I take away from this is that conventional software licensing, while it addresses a legitimate need in some areas of software (the need to diffuse development costs), means effectively not only shifting risk onto the developer but increasing it by orders of magnitude. The sort of risk that one has from investing in a feature for an open source project is far less than the risk that a software house takes in building the next version, because they take on all risk, centralize it, and then hope to make it back through control. This doesn't reduce risk for the end user though by very much.
So what the hell happened to 8080 and 6800 APL? That would have truly changed the landscape. It wasn't quite the low hanging fruit Basic was though.
There was a good write up of the context surrounding this letter in Steven Levy's book, Hackers (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Computer..." rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Computer...</a>).<p>It pissed off lots of people in the community and seemed to be against the spirit of what the hackers were doing at the time (writing and sharing code).<p>I recall another programmer being irritated by the letter and writing his own basic interpreter and asking $5 for it (which was far less than what Gates was asking).<p>Book is worth reading for the historical context of computing if you weren't around to see it.<p>####<p>Edit [Relevant part of wikipedia page]:
Tiny BASIC: Altair BASIC was an interpreter that translated instructions from the BASIC programming language into assembly instructions that the Altair 8800 could understand. It was developed by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, the founders of Micro-soft, specifically for the Altair 8800 and it would fit in 4K of memory. Unlike previous hackers and against the Hacker Ethic, Micro-Soft and MITS felt that people should pay for BASIC just like they paid for any add-on card. Many hackers had in fact put in orders for BASIC, but still had to wait for the order to be shipped. During a show put up by MITS, someone got hold of and copied a paper tape containing Altair BASIC.<p>The tapes were duplicated and passed around freely before the commercial product was even shipped to customers. Gates and Allen did not appreciate this turn of events since they were actually paid commission for each copy of BASIC that MITS sold. Gates responded by writing an open letter titled “Open Letter to Hobbyists” that considered the sharing of software to be theft. Tiny BASIC was a similar interpreter that would fit in only 2K of memory as it supported a subset of the functionality of Micro-Soft BASIC (which itself was a subset of Dartmouth BASIC).<p>It was developed by Dick Whipple and John Arnold in Tyler, Texas and distributed freely in PCC magazine. Many more people sent in improvements and programs developed in Tiny BASIC to be published. This eventually led to the creation of Dr. Dobb's Journal edited by Jim Warren that distributed free or very inexpensive software in response to Gates' claims of theft. Tom Pittman was someone else who did not take kindly to Gates' words. He wrote a version of Tiny BASIC for the Motorola 6800 microprocessor.<p>Although he sold it to AMI for $3,500, he retained the rights to sell it to others and decided to charge only $5 for it. He received many orders and even money from people who had already gotten a copy and simply wanted to pay him for his efforts. Pittman also wrote the essay “Deus Ex Machina” on the AI and hardware hackers and what tied them together. Lee Felsenstein and Bob Marsh banded together to create a fully contained computer for an issue of Popular Electronics that they called SOL that sold for under a thousand dollars.<p>####
For those who aren't familiar with this saga, Richard Stallman went on to found the Free Software Foundation about 10 years later and, in my opinion, has proven to Gates that you don't need to make software proprietary in order to make money.