As the world's first home computers appeared in 1975, Bill Gates -- then 20 years old -- screamed that "Most of you steal your software..." (Gates had coded the operating system 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."
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 free or at minimal cost..." And the earliest 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" in October of 1976.)
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 30 years later, that movement finally won over Steve Jobs.
(Score: 3, Touché) by looorg on Wednesday February 04, @10:51AM (3 children)
I have seen pictures of 20 year old Gates. I'm fairly sure I could fight him and win. Even today. Unless he uses all his Microsoft billions to have his henchmen deal with me.
That said sure I can understand him. But still $500 for the BASIC. I wasn't aware that was the price. Seems to be somewhat over the top. That is more then the kit for the entire machine cost, and you had to put that together yourself.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 04, @11:01AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applesoft_BASIC [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 5, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 04, @11:33AM (1 child)
> But still $500 for the BASIC.
The irony was that Bill had gotten his BASIC source code by dumpster diving and then developed it into a product using stolen time from university computers. That was back when you paid for computer usage by the hour or fraction thereof.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Bentonite on Thursday February 05, @03:45AM
If there are cycles free, you cannot steal timesharing time with a trivial load (i.e. an editor session) - as unloaded with a cycles, a timesharing computer would just be sitting there wasting cycles.
There was an agreement that the students at the university were welcome to use idle computer time in exchange for doing something useful - of course non-student billy boy and his co-developer broke that agreement by developing proprietary software - leading to the university to remove them when they found out (the university likely wouldn't have minded if some non-students developed some free software and shared it with the students at the university).
While it wasn't theft to utilize such idle resources, it was clearly an immoral act to use the resources to develop proprietary software.
You could construct your own computer from a kit (there were of course more limitations than big commercial machines) and not pay by the hour, but at that time, for a several dozen hours of work, it was cheaper to hire computer time by the hour.
Billy only ended of paying for a few hours of computer time at a commercial time-sharing service to finalize the software (the total cost was clearly less than $500).
Billy of course in his "letter to hobbyists", complained that hobbyists made his business successful by widely copying the software, without paying him $500 for working for him (computer manufacturers looked for the most popular BASIC and found that MS-BASIC was most popular and therefore licensed hundreds to thousands of copies).
The letter of course claimed the computer time was "$40,000", which is completely ludicrous.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 04, @11:32AM
Bill Gates fucked literal children.
He’s also fucked your children by donating so much money to feed and keep alive Africans. That’s never going to be a positive return on investment for civilization … it’s just going to bankrupt future generations.
Feeding Africans is like feeding stray cats or breeding mosquitoes.
It’s okay to be mad at Bill Gates for all of the above. Also Fuck Windows.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by gnuman on Wednesday February 04, @01:15PM (4 children)
Let's not be too hard on Bill when he was 20 year cowboying his way on university computers. People's perceptions change and adapt with the times. Remember when Microsoft under Gates said that GPL is the great evil as it's a viral license?
https://opensource.microsoft.com/blog/2018/03/19/microsoft-open-source-licensing-gplv3 [microsoft.com]
So things change. As for Bill Gates? We love to put labels on people as friend or enemy, but in reality maybe it would be better to take a page from Linus' page --- Bill Gates were never enemies of Linux or OSS in the first place. And the drama from Bill's life 50 years ago is kind of immaterial except to people that enjoy soap operas. I'm pretty sure he (and others involved) views is with less emotion than people that were not involved with it back in the day.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday February 04, @01:38PM
It was a different world back then. No private individuals really owned computers before then. They were all owned by companies and other institutions. Software was mostly written in-house by experts employed directly by those organisations and the software was generally intimately tied to one particular computer system. Portability was rarely a consideration, and not really possible without a great deal of effort. When microcomputers came along, suddenly everyone and their brother could have a computer, few knew how to program, and you can see the problem. If you had previously been earning a living by writing code, doing so for a microcomputer was going to be much harder.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 04, @01:51PM
Stealing time on a government research grant computer.
"drama from Bill's life 50 years ago is kind of immaterial"
But what he did to weasel his way out of the the government's anti-trust
case a decade later is not and we still live with the blowback from that
corruption.
Then there is him showing up in the Epstein files...
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday February 04, @05:47PM
I can't find anything Bill Gates said positively [itprotoday.com] about Linux, though.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Bentonite on Thursday February 05, @04:23AM
The linked article is not about encouraging the GPLv2 - it in fact deeply insults the freedom by referring to it as an "open source license", when the license does not say "open" in it and long predates "open source software" (which only existed since 1998); https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html [gnu.org]
That's rather a legal agreement to workaround one of the bugs in the GPLv2, where if you violate the license, even by mistake, the license automatically terminates and you don't get it back without agreement with every last copyright holder.
Microsoft has violated Linux's license in the past, as well as a few other programs under the GPLv2-variant, LGPLv2.1-variant & LGPLv2-variant (definitely by mistake), so has all of the other businesses listed, thus they've come to a cross-agreement, where each company agrees to not pursue damages against each other, for continuing to distribute despite a terminated license, in exchange for pretending to comply with the terms when caught infringing (i.e. release some of the source code under the GPLv2-only).
The GPLv3+ fixes that bug, by providing a period to come back into compliance and reinstating the license once compliance is achieved - but it seems that the "Software Freedom Conservancy" has been going around encouraging applying the same compliance terms to the GPLv2, rather than fixing the problem by encouraging upgrading to the GPLv3-or-later, or at least encouraging licensing GPLv2-or-later (allowing upgrading to the GPLv3-or-later, to get GPLv3 terms).
Note how it lists "GNU" or "Free Software Foundation" right at the bottom, as that's unavoidable to make the agreement valid (it is customary to put the legal definitions at the start).
It is true that such proprietary kernel and the development model of developing software for a business totally gratis (which they usually proceed to make proprietary), in the hope that they hire you, are clearly things that Bill wouldn't dislike.
Bill has been doing evil his entire life and he hasn't stopped - sure he has done some good things, but that comes nowhere near outweighing the huge amount of bad.
Bill and microsoft were against GNU from the very start, but they were too afraid of even naming the GNU - instead they write or said "Linux" whether possible.
(Score: 2, Informative) by RTJunkie on Wednesday February 04, @02:55PM (2 children)
Old timer here. The Altair 8800 did not originally have an operating system, but Gates and Allen developed a version of BASIC to run on it. Apparently, the availability of that language had a big impact on the success of these machines.
IMSAI developed a clone of the 8800 and adopted CP/M as its OS. Later Microsoft developed MS-DOS which was, apparently, heavily influenced by CP/M.
(Score: 3, Informative) by turgid on Wednesday February 04, @03:04PM (1 child)
Microsoft bought in MS-DOS from another company, which had written it to be effectively a clone of CP/M for the 8086 architecture. It was cheap and nasty.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 4, Touché) by Freeman on Wednesday February 04, @04:07PM
Just like Fast Food. People love it.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 04, @04:19PM (10 children)
With your software copyrighted, all you need is a PC and an idea. You can make a lot of money. With "copy left" you have to build a hardware business, or some other business that's served by software slaves. The barrier to entry is a lot steeper. So of course when you're a suit presiding over a multi-$billion enterprise, you eventually come around. Gates knows when to pull up the draw bridge.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 04, @04:28PM (2 children)
" With "copy left" you have to build a hardware business"
Bullshit.
No one writes their own OS any more. Linux and that whole "free" infrastructure
is what the world runs on now.
Eventually, the OS that Cutler built will rot from AI slop, but no one will care
because no value can be made from operating systems infrastructure.
(Score: 5, Informative) by canopic jug on Wednesday February 04, @05:10PM (1 child)
No one writes their own OS any more. Linux and that whole "free" infrastructure
It's rare but there are a number of simpler operating systems coming up, like ST-DOS [sininenankka.dy.fi] with its lEEt/OS GUI [sininenankka.dy.fi]. That's a one-man team.
Then there are bigger projects like Haiku OS [haiku-os.org]. Even old, formerly moribund projects like Hurd are seeing a revival. Those are likely caused by people seeing the writing on the wall for Linux. It has not seen culling and refactoring like the kernels for some of the BSDs have. The result is that it gets bigger and bigger with more cruft and more legacy code.
However, while the kernel is one thing, coming up with a new user space is a whole different matter. In that regards there is basically only a choice between GNU and the BSDs.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 04, @08:16PM
"there are a number of simpler operating systems coming up"
Toys.
Apple failed in the 90s writing a modern operating system because doing all the grunt work
is hard, and there isn't enough payback for even their NIH.
(Score: 4, Touché) by krishnoid on Wednesday February 04, @05:45PM (4 children)
And a metric crapton of lawyers. And lobbyists and your own enforcement squad [cnet.com], probably.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by aafcac on Thursday February 05, @12:09AM (3 children)
Not necessarily. If it's a simple enough idea for one or two people to develop, and priced low enough, it can be hard for anybody to compete with that. There's still plenty of software that could be written where you could get a million or two million people to give you a couple bucks. There's like 8bn people in the world, so that's a fraction of a percent of the world population and people in most parts of the world have $1 or $2 if they've got something to run the program on if it's sufficiently useful.
(Score: 2) by Bentonite on Thursday February 05, @04:40AM (2 children)
The main thing that prevents the development of free software that you can pay a dollar for a copy of, is payment systems.
It is very inconvenient, with many restrictions and lots of proprietary software in the way of paying small amounts to others.
A real free software developer isn't going to require running proprietary software to get a copy of free software is he?
Cryptocurrencies solve some of the problems, but governments have made it hard to get cryptocurrencies without a credit card and doxing yourself to some ??? business.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Friday February 06, @03:50AM (1 child)
This is word salad nonsense. If it's free, payment is a non-issue. If it's paid for, I see a ton of Android apps for hardly any money.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Bentonite on Friday February 06, @05:19AM
Free means freedom.
You can construct "free of charge", but nothing is ever really without charge.
While too many have fallen for marketing that has "free" plastered over it, for things that aren't gratis, that take your freedom - that's their problem, not mine.
Free software is not necessarily gratis - anyone can choose to only give a copy of free software to someone else if payment is made (but almost nobody does that anymore, as it only takes a tiny amount of power and a some internet packets to send someone a copy of software).
Every Android cr...app on the google played store is proprietary software, whether it's gratis or costs money (and even if it has source code available under a free license, I don't think developers are even allowed to publish anything without "linking" it with proprietary google libraries, which makes the software proprietary).
The idea of such "stores" is that the suckers only need to carry out the inconvenience of setting up an account and payment methods once, allowing for many micro-transactions of $1-5 (with a fat 30% fee on each), actioned by merely clicking a button (even the biggest sucker will only pay $1 a handful of times and then stop, if an account needs to be setup and payment details entered every time).
F-droid isn't much better (even though the publication policy is that requiring money isn't allowed), as everything is compiled/assembled against a proprietary google SDK (that does not correspond to published claimed source code of the SDK), thus it can't be said that anything from F-droid is free software.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 04, @11:01PM
On the contrary, copyright is center of the "copy left". Also, software like GPL started for 1 purpose -- stop re-inventing the wheel. You are paid to alter software and everyone benefits, instead of reinventing and rewriting same software over and over again as was very common in the past. Today, many software companies that sell certifications and support contracts benefit hugely from this too. We are talking many tens of billions if not hundreds of billions are spend every year on "copy left" or otherwise freedom software support contracts. Heck, the company I work for makes almost 10 digits in sales alone. And we sell no hardware or SaaS or whatever and no lock-in ecosystem either. Just pure certification and support play.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Bentonite on Thursday February 05, @04:33AM
Copyleft licenses like the GPLv2-or-later and GPLv3-or-later, do not prevent legitimate business activities with software.
Although now selling copies of software is now entirely redundant, as anyone with a computer can make unlimited copies, there are a few business that sell copies of software as free software under various GNU license.
The money is now in custom software and support - most software businesses do carry out such legitimate business (you do make a good profit, but you actually have to work for it).
Microsoft has been a parasite that has utilized governmental restrictions to the fullest extend from the very start (very few parasites can exist at the same time and all of them try to wipe out each other), but even they realized that their joke of an OS couldn't compete practically with GNU/Linux and it would be over as soon as their layers and layers of proprietary sabotage were finally completely dismantled.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by pdfernhout on Friday February 06, @12:56AM
Even ignoring Gates' dumpster diving to learn how to write code from the listings ( https://www.businessinsider.com/10-things-you-didnt-know-about-bill-gates-2011-4?op=1#in-high-school-he-went-dumpster-diving-to-try-and-get-source-code-1 [businessinsider.com] ),
and MS-DOS being a legally-questionable rip-off of Gary Kildall's CPM bought by Gates ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall [wikipedia.org] ),
compare (from Bill Gates' "An Open Letter to Hobbyists"):
"“Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?” he [Gates] wrote."
with this background on Gates explained by Phillip Greenspun:
https://www.philip.greenspun.com/bg/ [greenspun.com]
"William Henry Gates III made his best decision on October 28, 1955, the night he was born. He chose J.W. Maxwell as his great-grandfather. Maxwell founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III. In some of the later lessons, you will be encouraged to take entrepreneurial risks. You may find it comforting to remember that at any time you can fall back on a trust fund worth many millions of 1998 dollars."
Bill Gates could have afforded to write free software for his entire life based on that trust fund.
So the answer to Bill Gate's question of "Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?" is him! But he chose not to. And he also implied no one else could create free software (even as people were doing it, and even as organizations were funding free software, and even as he was using at-least-partially-publicly-funded computer time at non-profit Harvard to create MS BASIC, the core design ideas for which were essentially given away for free by others). Hypocrisy.
By needlessly promoting the idea of artificial scarcity in those early days, Gates deeply harmed the computing world.
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.