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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.
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.
Yes, this is a famous letter which can be considered a foundation of Microsoft's historic hostility to any open technologies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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.
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 .
Yes, this is a famous letter which can be considered a foundation of Microsoft's historic hostility to any open technologies.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you referring to the obtuse names?
Probably to the tendency to produce n slightly different versions in an attempt to segmentize the market.
There was at least one early BASIC extension, for example, where you could pick the commands you wanted "a la carte", with number of bytes required for each one of them listed, to pack the ones that were most important for you to fit into a specific size. You'd pay for the size you chose.
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.
... 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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]
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
... 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…
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')