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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: 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.