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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: 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].