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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, Interesting) by pdfernhout on Friday February 06 2026, @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.