"Most of you steal your software"

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/10/most-of-you-steal-your-software.html

by duck • 13 years ago

203 113 13 years ago

Bill Gates sure is a great marketer. Igniting this issue in such direct way made people pay attention. No wonder he was able to build MS into what it was.

codeulike2• 13 years ago

Yeah, note that the letter carefully mentions many different products that are available or coming soon

walid2• 13 years ago

Interesting point. Didn't recognize that.

joemcm• 13 years ago

Such a great precursor to what goes on nowadays with music and such.

tnuc• 13 years ago

Except the record labels would rather hand out huge fines and jail sentences.

gonehome• 13 years ago

There was a good write up of the context surrounding this letter in Steven Levy's book, Hackers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Computer...).

It pissed off seemingly everyone in the community and seemed to be against the spirit of what the hackers were doing at the time (writing and sharing code).

I recall another programmer being irritated by the letter and writing his own basic interpreter and asking $5 for it (which was far less than what Gates was asking).

Book is worth reading for the historical context of computing if you weren't around to see it.

####

Edit [Relevant part of wikipedia page]:

Tiny BASIC: Altair BASIC was an interpreter that translated instructions from the BASIC programming language into assembly instructions that the Altair 8800 could understand. It was developed by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, the founders of Micro-soft, specifically for the Altair 8800 and it would fit in 4K of memory. Unlike previous hackers and against the Hacker Ethic, Micro-Soft and MITS felt that people should pay for BASIC just like they paid for any add-on card. Many hackers had in fact put in orders for BASIC, but still had to wait for the order to be shipped. During a show put up by MITS, someone got hold of and copied a paper tape containing Altair BASIC.

The tapes were duplicated and passed around freely before the commercial product was even shipped to customers. Gates and Allen did not appreciate this turn of events since they were actually paid commission for each copy of BASIC that MITS sold. Gates responded by writing an open letter titled “Open Letter to Hobbyists” that considered the sharing of software to be theft. Tiny BASIC was a similar interpreter that would fit in only 2K of memory as it supported a subset of the functionality of Micro-Soft BASIC (which itself was a subset of Dartmouth BASIC).

It was developed by Dick Whipple and John Arnold in Tyler, Texas and distributed freely in PCC magazine. Many more people sent in improvements and programs developed in Tiny BASIC to be published. This eventually led to the creation of Dr. Dobb's Journal edited by Jim Warren that distributed free or very inexpensive software in response to Gates' claims of theft. Tom Pittman was someone else who did not take kindly to Gates' words. He wrote a version of Tiny BASIC for the Motorola 6800 microprocessor.

Although he sold it to AMI for $3,500, he retained the rights to sell it to others and decided to charge only $5 for it. He received many orders and even money from people who had already gotten a copy and simply wanted to pay him for his efforts. Pittman also wrote the essay “Deus Ex Machina” on the AI and hardware hackers and what tied them together. Lee Felsenstein and Bob Marsh banded together to create a fully contained computer for an issue of Popular Electronics that they called SOL that sold for under a thousand dollars.

####

rvkennedy• 13 years ago

It's a pity that the then Micro-soft did not have copy protection technology - if they had, they might never have established such a strong foothold in the market, and the history of computing would have been quite different.

zdw• 13 years ago

Yeah, they look like they've really been hurting for years now...

(oh come one people, downvotes? You can't tell the OP is attempting humor, and I'm trying to acknowledge that?)

saraid2162• 13 years ago

From HN Guidelines:

> Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Confusion2• 13 years ago

To me it's quite obviously sarcasm based on a counterfactual and I don't see how one could interpret it otherwise.

Vivtek• 13 years ago

My guess is that "Yeah, me too" posts rarely add anything to the conversation - sorry, I'm being blunt here, but that's the way HN rolls. If you find a post humorous, just upvote and move on. You'll get your chance to crack a joke in due time.

The contrast is with ten-comment-long Redditesque variants-on-a-theme threads, which I personally enjoy - on Reddit. Here, I'd rather cut to the chase with insightful commentary.

dpcan• 13 years ago

Yes, I'd love to hear a response from (2013) Bill Gates to this letter. I wonder if he sees this in a different light now?

Could the piracy of his early programming language been what started the exponential growth/adoption of all Micro-soft software?

If he could, would he go back and release BASIC for free as a springboard to sell other software?

undershirt• 13 years ago

[He said something similar about China:](http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/461490/piracy)

> ...in 1998 during a candid moment in front of an audience at the University of Washington acknowledged the problem with enforcing software copyrights in the developing world:

> Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don’t pay for the software. Someday they will, though, and as long as they’re going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.

flomo• 13 years ago

Microsoft moved to a business model where they received royalties paid directly from the OEMs. And I suppose, BASIC was a teaser for MS's more advanced developer tools.

Natsu• 13 years ago

Heh, that reminded me of this old thing:

http://www.macgui.com/usenet/?author=gm%40trsvax&group=2...

Internal Security Violation The tree of evil bears bitter fruit Crime does not pay The Shadow knows

Trashing Program Disk.

shmerl3• 13 years ago

Yes, this is a famous letter which can be considered a foundation of Microsoft's historic hostility to any open technologies.

codeulike2• 13 years ago

Its just a letter complaining about a product being pirated. It only shocked people because the idea of end-consumers paying for software was novel then.

shmerl3• 13 years ago

The point is that it demonstrates the core ideas which Bill Gates put in action in Microsoft. I.e. aggressive IP methodology.

slurgfest3• 13 years ago

Piracy is not the same as "open technologies" in any way. In fact, the latter prevents the former (if I settle on GIMP instead of pirating Photoshop...)

shmerl3• 13 years ago

If you read it carefully it's not just about piracy. It's against sharing (which in open source happens without any piracy). His basic idea - sharing prevents good software from being written. I.e. only closed paid model can be incentive to create good software. It's the cornerstone idea of Microsoft and is very in line with their historic hatred towards open technologies which they always saw as a threat (and obviously not because of piracy). It also is in line with their aggressive approach to enforcing patents and copyrights.

Wingman4l7• 13 years ago

Wikipedia has a pretty extensive article on this famous letter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

mct• 13 years ago

An interesting line from that article, which I hadn't previously seen:

> In early 1976 ads for its Apple I computer, Apple Inc made the claims that "our philosophy is to provide software for our machines free or at minimal cost"[23] and "yes folks, Apple BASIC is Free"[24]

tonyedgecombe• 13 years ago

Joel Spolsky had an interesting article on this idea [1], he said "smart companies try to commoditize their products' complements."

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html

johnpowell• 13 years ago

>Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC.

I guess old habits die hard.

notJim• 13 years ago

Are you referring to the obtuse names?

Confusion2• 13 years ago

Probably to the tendency to produce n slightly different versions in an attempt to segmentize the market.

slajax• 13 years ago

I think he would say now that this letter was rather short sighted. It seems the theft of basic by hobbyists may have lead to the catalyst needed for his software to dominate the commercial PC market some years later. Clearly it wasn't just him developing software for these computers. I wonder how they attributed licensing to it. Or if there even was such a thing at that time.

Funny how some things change, yet stay the same. Glad the OP posted this.

icambron2• 13 years ago

I readily grant that there's a huge amount of selection bias to this, but from this remove, it's difficult not to read this as, "pirate all the software you please, we'll still end up as billionaires."

walid2• 13 years ago

Can't agree more. I still have to see a software vendor out of business because of piracy. In fact, piracy is usually an indication of strong sales and lack of piracy speaks a lot of how interested people are in your software.

slurgfest3• 13 years ago

Right, if a failed company (even one which failed because of piracy) had a letter like this, you wouldn't be reading it.

icambron2• 13 years ago

My only reservation on that line of argument is that, apparently, it "caused quite a stir at the time". But yes, the selection bias here is real enough.

alan_cx• 13 years ago

... and as a result poor Bill has lived in total poverty, only to die of scurvy in a slum. His business died with out trace and he never been heard of since. A tragic story. Yes, bad hobbyists.

Point being, despite all the piracy, there is still some money to be made. The complaint is that such folk are not making enough money. See, Bill should be twice or 3 times as rich. Man, he's really losing out.

Of course then we have to deal with the age old assumption that every person with a pirated copy would have paid for it. Which is, er, optimistic, at best. IMHO, the loss is negligible. All they the copyright owner gets in reality is the satisfaction that not so many people use their product, but those who do pay.

I'm not that happy at hitting Bill with this as he is one of the filthy rich people who actually uses his accumulated wealth for good causes. Which is ideal really.

ghjm• 13 years ago

But he wasn't, or anything close to it, when he wrote this letter.

rbanffy2• 13 years ago

He wasn't anything close to poverty either.

wglb• 13 years ago

He came from a quite well off family. And used that to his advantage at the beginning of his business career.

zero_intp• 13 years ago

The great philanthropic era was a result of the robber barons. The idea that we might enter a new era of such figures is only a sign of the grossly disproportionate wealth scales that damage our societies.

It is a despotic idea that society must endure the deprivations of these individuals or corporation only to be rewarded with narrow visions of a better future world through the myopic eyes of the DuPont's, Gates', or Carnegie's of the world. These "great" men robbed, captured, or monopolized vast tracts of our communal resources in their acquisition of said wealth (edit: I accidentally an 'r')

carlob3• 13 years ago

Yes! Next time you visit the Frick collection in New York City (you really should) think about the bloody repression of the Homestead strike [0].

I really think that the likes of Gates, Frick, Carnegie, Rockefeller or the more recent Jim Simons. Should have been taxed at a much much steeper rate, just like Buffett proposed [1], instead of waiting for their kindness of heart.

By replacing philanthropy with taxation we get the democratic process to choose what is the best way to spend this money, instead of their however enlightened agenda.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_Steel_Strike

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffett_Rule

rmrfrmrf• 13 years ago

I find your disdain for the wealthy disturbing.

tokenadult• 13 years ago

Part of this subthread discusses how Bill Gates started out in life and how much he has prospered since he wrote the open letter. Just on that point, it might be of interest to check an online post "Why Bill Gates is Richer than You" (more than a decade old, before Gates got involved in philanthropy full time) about how he made his money.

http://philip.greenspun.com/humor/bill-gates

Note that I have not fact-checked this at all, so if anyone has any factual corrections or updates (which could come from one of the published biographical writings about Gates), I would be glad to hear them.

edraferi2• 13 years ago

Interesting link, with some prescience:

"What most users want, though, is a cheap simple device that lets them collaborate with others... Thus the market for computing may in the end boil down to simple stuff to be used by consumers and reliable stuff to be operated by professional IT staff. Windows is way too complex for most consumers and difficult to justify on the server side when you can run Linux for free."

e.g. "someday we'll just build the cloud on LAMP"

meaty• 13 years ago

The irony is that Microsoft made it even easier to steal stuff by forcing complete market dominance.

It's easy to steal if everything is compatible and connected i.e the DOS/Windows monoculture.

nextparadigms• 13 years ago

Imagine if there would've been a way to force 100% of people who got Windows in China, India, and other poor countries all over the world to pay up $100 or more for their copy.

If that would've been at all possible, I think Linux would've had higher than 50% market share in the PC market today. For that kind of poor countries, Windows licenses were and still are prohibitively expensive for the vast majority of their citizens, so if being forced to buy Windows instead of pirating it, I think most would've just gone with Linux, and its adoption would've exploded within a few years, from the moment everyone in poor countries had to make that decision. Therefore software support from the big vendors would've arrived relatively quickly.

Unfortunately for us (and fortunately for Microsoft), there was no way to force people into that decision, so we were left with a Windows monopoly for the past 2 decades.

renanbirck• 13 years ago

This is the major problem I have while trying to tell people about Linux (and other open-source software). It's hard to argue against "my [proprietary software] copy was free" - when effectively, it was, since nothing will happen to them.

narcissus2• 13 years ago

I read once where Bill Gates predicted that eventually people would buy software and that the hardware would be free. I can't remember where I read it ('Business at the Speed of Light', maybe?) but it stuck with me as just, well, ridiculous.

Anyway, the fact that he says "As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share." kind of makes me wonder how he ever ended up with that thought I mentioned at the start.

And I know it sounds crazy that he would ever think that: that's why it stuck with me I guess.

bconway• 13 years ago

Have you looked at any carrier's web site recently? Tons of $0 full-featured Android smartphones, and tons of apps for sale (subsidized by service fees, of course).

We're already there.

martinced• 13 years ago

You conveniently left out that there are way more $$$ smartphones and tons of apps for FREE. Even inside walled gardens.

Not to mention the desktop and laptop space where you buy your hardware (and OS if you're not using a free one like Linux) but then there are a lot of free apps.

narcissus2• 13 years ago

I guess when I read it I didn't think "hardware is free as in you'll be paying for a contract of service where the cost of that service includes the cost of the hardware".

I mean, if we're to be able to redefine 'actual' costs like that, maybe my house is free... it's just included in the cost of my bank sending me a statement every month.

I do see your point, though: it definitely seems that way, but surely nobody can argue that the production cost of one more piece of hardware is more 'free' than that of a piece of software.

sesqu• 13 years ago

The entertainment market is another good example of what he might have been thinking of. Many games consoles and video devices have been sold at a loss, though it's obviously a greater gamble than selling payment plans disguised as service.

edraferi2• 13 years ago

This is not ridiculous, it's the definition of Software as a Service.

There are two main factors at play:

1) Cost of reproduction (copying) 2) Value to end user

Hardware has historically been harder to reproduce because it's physical. This gap is closing as hardware becomes a commodity. You don't need a server anymore - just spin one up on EC2. Need chips? visit a Chinese bulk electronics markets and buy them by the scoop.

Software provides more value to the end user because it makes the hardware do something. People pay for great software because it cleverly moves information around to meet their needs. You still need hardware to run it, eventually, but it becomes dramatically less important. The servers that power your webmail are entirely abstract to an end user. Angry Birds runs on basically anything. etc

moccajoghurt• 13 years ago

Don't review the letter from today's perspective.

Bill Gates didn't know that his work will spread over the world and he will become one of the richest persons alive.

He didn't know that there will be a huge open source community in the future, where it is normal to develop software for free.

All he knew is that he was working fulltime on something for three years and wasn't payed for it.

For me this letter is just a snapshot of the past with an understandable point of view.

hawleyal• 13 years ago

I disagree.

Stallman was hacking in 1976 and many of his ilk were free software advocates.

Gates knew what he was doing. He derived his work from others, but denied others the same leeway.

laumars• 13 years ago

Except, the hobbyist community back then was even further removed from commercialisation than the open source market is today.

The hobbyist community back then was based around clubs of people sharing their achievements; the computers they built, software they'd written and any neat tricks they'd invented (like using the electrical interference of the original Altar to play a tune on a radio http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgYhVnmeWrk ). The hobbyist community was very much driven by sharing ideas and code.

This is why people got annoyed at that letter. It not only flew against everything the community was built around, but also made some heavy criticisms about their members as well.

When you review that letter in the context of the community is was directed at and the time it was written, it seems even more out of place than it does today.

jscheel7• 13 years ago

It's amazing, and frankly stupid, how many people try to justify theft. Sorry guys, regardless of what utopian ideals of OSS you have, and I have them too, you must respect the creator's wishes. If they ask you to pay for the software, then you MUST pay for the software. Anything else is theft.

Let's say you are a freelance developer. Do you think for one second that it would be ok for your clients to let you do all the work, then take your code and not pay you? I mean, knowledge should be free, right? Screw the fact that you built the software with the expectation of getting paid for your hard work.

It's one thing to create something with the intention of sharing it with the world. It's an entirely different thing for anybody to justify stealing what you have done.

monochromatic• 13 years ago

I agree with your sentiment, but it's not actually "theft." More like "copyright infringement."

TheCapn• 13 years ago

We all understand what is being discussed here. We don't need to argue semantics over what it means to obtain something you didn't pay for (but should have).

It seems that the tech community stands adamantly behind the "copyright infringement isn't theft" mantra but in reality the moral crime is taking something you weren't entitled to. Our actions don't really seem to consider the state of the original product making the difference between "theft" and "copyright infringement" because it is not concerning to us. For the developer/distributor/publisher/artist or whomever is expecting a cut from sales the result is the same: they lost a part of their wage.

Admittedly I've done my share of piracy but now that I spend a good chunk of my free time releasing software or writing code I have stopped; it feels kind of shitty to see something taken without any regard for your hardships. Hell, as a result I even go out of my way to make sure developers are paid their dues by purchasing almost any app I use. If I come to expect others to pay/donate for my effort it is quite hypocritical to not do the same as a consumer.

slurgfest3• 13 years ago

It's amazing, and frankly stupid, how quickly you slid from piracy to OSS.

OSS has nothing to do with piracy. If I licensed my project MIT, sharing it is not piracy. OSS platforms do not have thriving piracy ecosystems because there is plenty of OSS software for them. In my experience, people who believe in OSS are the most likely to champion using a legal OSS alternative to pirating some widely-used proprietary software.

jscheel7• 13 years ago

I've released plenty of OSS myself, and I agree with what you are saying. Unfortunately, the OSS movement is also co-opted by people who are willing to steal to get what they want, and use ideological mantras of the OSS movement to justify their actions.

decode• 13 years ago

> Sorry guys, regardless of what utopian ideals of OSS you have, and I have them too, you must respect the creator's wishes. If they ask you to pay for the software, then you MUST pay for the software. Anything else is theft.

In a legal sense, this is patently false in every country I know of. Even ignoring the point others have made that theft is not copyright infringement under the law, the assertion is false. Every country I know of has exceptions to copyright law. In the US it's called Fair Use, in many Commonwealth nations it's called Fair Dealing, in Germany it's just called "Limitations on Copyright" (Schranken des Urheberrechts). In every case, the creator's wishes are not absolute.

But more interesting to me is that we have taken a purely legal concept that was completely new just 303 years ago and turned it into a broadly accepted moral imperative. Those with a vested interest have succeeded in tying this new legal concept to an ancient moral wrong, that of theft. And they have been so successful at this, that many people would dismiss the distinction as semantic quibbling. To me, this is a fascinating sociological and philosophical phenomenon.

For anyone else who is interested in this cultural history, I highly recommend "Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars" by William Patry.

jscheel7• 13 years ago

Good thing I'm not a complete idiot, or I wouldn't know or understand fair use. People tend to forget that fair use is limited in its scope. Unfortunately, a lot of people's idea of fair use is, "I want it, so I'm gonna take it." It IS a moral imperative. It IS stealing. I don't care how you sugarcoat it. In high-school and the first part of my college life, I pirated music and applications with impunity. I justified it every way I could, but at the end of the day, I realized I was stealing -- regardless of what nuanced legal argument I could come up with. It drives me crazy when people say "it's not stealing, it's just copyright infringement," like that magically makes what they are doing better.

rayiner• 13 years ago

The moral underpinnings of copyright are quite a bit older than that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law#Early_....

Re: copyright being 303 years old. First, there were developments in copyright prior to the English copyright act. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law#Early_.... Printing in England was done by a royally chartered monopoly from 1557. Printing was regulated by an order of the Star Chamber in 1637 and the Licensing Press Act of 1679 before the Statute of Anne introduced copyrights in 1710. So basically contemporaneously with the widespread adoption of technology in England that enabled copies of written works to be quickly made, regulation has existed to protect works from copying. Copyright itself has existed for 300 of the 500 or so years since printed books became common in England.

I agree that it's not sensible to link copyright to the ancient moral crime of theft. It's more sensible to link it to the very old if not ancient moral crime of trespass: http://www.slesher.com/trespass.html.

A copyright owner's moral right is basically the right to exclude--the right to control with whom one shares his original work.

sp332• 13 years ago

They can't force you to pay for the software after they have already decided to release the code under an open license. As a high-profile example, Red Hat sells Red Hat Enterprise Linux (with various support options). But they release release (most of) their code under various open-source licenses, and the Centos project builds a binary-compatible OS with only the trademarked Red Hat stuff changed.

ericbb• 13 years ago

The utopian ideal that is relevant here is the ideal that information should never be considered property. So you can't properly claim to be one of the utopian idealists while using the words "theft" and "stealing" here.

jscheel7• 13 years ago

I don't buy into the utopian ideals. I offer plenty of work up as OSS, but when someone chooses not to, I respect that as well.

jdechko• 13 years ago

Theft vs Copyright infringement is all semantics anyway. Like you said, if the software is for sale and you take it and use it without paying, it's wrong, regardless of what you call it.

I don't think anyone would flatly come out and say that a developer doesn't deserve to be paid for his/her work. Yet when you use software without paying for it, you are depriving the developer of his income.

cafard• 13 years ago

"The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000."

Pardon me, but wasn't a fair bit of that Harvard's computing power, ergo not directly paid for by Gates et al.?

STRML• 13 years ago

I would assume that's why it was worded the way it was, instead of "We have spent in excess of $40,000 on computer time."

"Most of you steal your software"

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