When 20-Year-Old Bill Gates Fought the World's First Software Pirates (thenewstack.io)
- Reference: 0180716494
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/02/01/1915221/when-20-year-old-bill-gates-fought-the-worlds-first-software-pirates
- Source link: https://thenewstack.io/50-years-ago-a-young-bill-gates-took-on-the-software-pirates/
> Just months after his 20th birthday, [2]Bill Gates had already angered the programmer community ," remembers this 50th-anniversary commemoration of Gates' Open Letter to Hobbyists. "As the first home computers began appearing in the 1970s, the world faced a question: Would its software be free?"
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> Gates railed in 1976 that "Most of you steal your software." Gates had coded the BASIC interpreter for Altair's first home computer with Paul Allen and Monte Davidoff — only to see it pirated by Steve Wozniak's friends at the Homebrew Computing Club. Expecting royalties, a none-too-happy Gates issued his letter in the club's newsletter (as well as Altair's own publication), complaining "I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up."
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> But freedom-loving coders had other ideas. When Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs released their Apple 1 home computer that summer, they stressed that "our philosophy is to provide software for our machines [3]free or at minimal cost ..." And early open-source hackers began writing their own free Tiny Basic interpreters to create a free alternative to the Gates/Micro-Soft code. This led to the first occurrence of the phrase "Copyleft" [4]in October of 1976 .
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> Open Source definition author Bruce Perens shares his thoughts today. "When I left Pixar in 2000, I stopped in Steve Job's office — which for some reason was right across the hall from mine... " Perens remembered. "I asked Steve: 'You still don't believe in this Linux stuff, do you...?'" And Perens remembers how that movement finally won over Steve Jobs and carried the day. "Three years later, Steve stood onstage in front of a slide that said ' [5]Open Source: We Think It's Great !' as he introduced the Safari browser, which at that time was based on the browser engine developed by the KDE Open Source project!"
[1] https://slashdot.org/~destinyland
[2] https://thenewstack.io/50-years-ago-a-young-bill-gates-took-on-the-software-pirates/
[3] http://apple1.chez.com/Apple1project/Gallery/Gallery.htm
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Copyleft_All_Wrongs_Reserved.png
[5] https://x.com/awesomekling/status/1769785618375102776
Re: (Score:2)
Genocide Joe Biden was a racist piece of shit since he got his political start opposing racial integration of schools. IIRC Harris's prior claim to fame was having more of her convictions reversed than any other prosecutor in her state. Carter is probably the only decent human being to have been president in a century.
Re: (Score:2)
Reagan took bribes, fairly openly, including the gift of an entire California ranch given to him by people who had clearly benefited from his Reign of Error. Ford was on the Warren Commission and in charge of fabricating a bio for Lee Oswald Harvey. He and Bush the Not-Stupid were probably both recruited by the CIA in college (U of Michigan was a hot spot of Company recruiting).
Couldn't help noticing that you skipped Carter, probably the only decent human being who ever became president in the last centur
Re: (Score:2)
Obama seems like a decent person. What's wrong with him?
That Altair BASIC ... (Score:4, Interesting)
... looks an awful lot like the BASIC I (and Bill) got my start on with a DEC PDP.
He was literally a software pirate (Score:1, Troll)
Microsoft basic was stolen code fished out of school trash cans.
Are we seeing this nonsense because he's in the Epstein files? I imagine his PR firm is working overtime right now.
Gates PR team is working overtime! (Score:1)
Anything to distance himself from the Epstein allegations. They aren't going anywhere by the way. No wonder his wife divorced him.
Re: (Score:2)
Bill cheated on his wife with somebody at work. He also was probably difficult to live with and she just waited until the last child to grow up to divorce.
I did not like if not hated Gates since the 80s. I don't think he did anything with Epstein. Being super rich and not trustworthy before even meeting Epstein, he'd not strike me as a fool who gets played by con men; especially, after years of people trying to get to his money.
It's not like there are not top-notch hookers around the world with legal servic
Re: Gates PR team is working overtime! (Score:2)
> Gates is just too smart for that.
Dont turn your brain off because you reached your moral threshold. Maybe he was involved because it wasnt about just sex. Gates and the Clintons have alwas been an immoral bunch. With enough wealth, it festered.
Re: (Score:2)
His interactions with Epstein revolved around trying to rustle up more donations to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Finish the story (Score:5, Informative)
You forgot to add " then Gates went on to commit anti-trust crimes, lie to the general public claiming anyone can use a computer, and ultimately spawned the company that would set computing back decades and cause irreparable harm that continues to this day and will likely do so in perpetuity. "
I remember pirating my copy of Spacewar! (Score:2)
Though running that paper tape through the reader was a pain.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, that's what you get for trying to use toilet paper instead of perforated paper tape when punching your bits.
Wrong assumption in the article (Score:5, Interesting)
I, Steve Wozniak, did not participate in the theft of the BASIC. It was funny to me to see others enjoying doing this. I had never used BASIC myself, at that time, only the more-scientific languages like Fortran, Algol, and PL-1, and several assembly languages. I sniffed the air and sensed that you needed BASIC to sell computers into homes, because of the book 101 Games in BASIC. I loved games and saw games as the key. It was the [MS] BASIC that inspired me to write a BASIC interpreter for my 6502 processor, in order to have a more useful computer.
Mod Parent Up (Score:4, Insightful)
Good to see ya, Woz!
Re: (Score:2)
Well the article doesn't mention you by name. That's only in the summary and it says that your friends did this, not you. Though I can see how this could easily be misinterpreted by a quick skim of the summary.
Missing some nuances (Score:2)
Some had pre-paid for Altair BASIC and it was months late. Gates didn't pay for the mainframe time used to run the emulator Altair BASIC was tested on. Technically, the code belonged to the university, but that legal term was never enforced. Several bugs were fixed before it was distributed.
Re: (Score:2)
That isn't the story the way I have heard it (e.g. as on Wikipedia). Gates and Allen used Harvard facilities to adapt an Intel 8008 emulator that Allen had written for their Traf-o-Data project. There doesn't seem to have been any kind of contract that made that work the property of Harvard even if Harvard did not intend their hardware to be used for commercial projects. They polished it on time purchased from a time-sharing service.
Gates is a hypocrite. Dumpster diving BASIC (Score:3)
...source code for the version his local university had, their listings were often discarded in the back bins of the labs. Oh, and he wasn't enrolled in classes there so he stole computer lab time to work on his version.
No I don't have the references handy, but they're out there.
Gate's Lies and donates to hide his guilt!!!! (Score:1)
Why is I remember back in the late 80's after Gates stole DOS that he was sued for not paying the programmer of DOS that Microsoft sold as MS-DOS? Rich people keep trying to change history and they suck at it while people that lived at the time can still speck up!!!
Re: (Score:2)
My understanding is that Gates bought what was then called QDOS from Seattle Computer Systems for $50K. There is much to be said about Microsoft's later business practices, but as far as I can tell, the acquisition of MS-DOS was perfectly ethical.
Operating System (Score:5, Informative)
Gates and Allen didn't code an operating system for the Altair They coded a BASIC interpreter.
Re: (Score:2)
Historic moment. (I corrected that in the submission.)
Re:Operating System (Score:5, Informative)
On that machine, it *was* an operating system.